New cancer drug shows promise for treating deadly disease

A new study has presented very promising results for the treatment of the cancer form multiple myeloma.

Multiple myeloma is a life-threatening disease and there is a dire medical need for new therapies, especially for the patients whose tumour cells have become resistant to the conventional drugs.

Professor Stig Linder at Karolinska Institutet’s Department of Oncology-Pathology, said that the discovery that their substance works on multiple myeloma cells resistant to conventional therapy is very promising for the future.

The study demonstrates that the drug candidate, called VLX1570, inhibits tumour growth and prolongs survival in preclinical multiple myeloma models.

The exact mechanism of action of the substance was identified earlier at Karolinska Institutet (Nature Medicine, 2011); put simply, the tumour cells can be said to be more sensitive than normal cells to disruption to the machinery that breaks down defective proteins.

When this machinery is blocked, it triggers apoptosis (programmed cell death) in the tumour cells.

Professor Linder said that they have shown that the drug candidate kills multiple myeloma cells from cancer patients, adding that the substance is also effective against myeloma cells that have developed a resistance to the clinically used drug bortezomib.

The study has been published in the journal Blood.