Leukaemia breakthrough: Experimental pill sees cancer vanish in 18 patients

Terminal leukaemia patients who were not responding to treatment now have hope for a cure, thanks to a new experimental pill called revumenib.

This drug has completely eliminated cancer in a third of the participants in a long-awaited clinical trial in the United States.

Although not all patients showed complete remission, scientists remain hopeful as the results indicate that the pill might pave the way to a cure for leukaemia in the future.

“We're incredibly hopeful by these results of patients that received this drug. This was their last chance,” said study co-author Dr Ghayas Issa, a leukaemia physician at the MD Anderson Cancer Center at the University of Texas.

“They have progressed on multiple lines of therapy and a fraction of them, about half, had disappearance of their leukaemia cells from their bone marrow,” he told Euronews Next.

Acute myeloid leukaemia (AML) is a type of cancer that attacks the bone marrow, where blood cells are produced, and causes the uncontrolled production of defective cells.

Revumenib is a new class of targeted therapy for acute leukaemia that inhibits a specific protein called menin. The drug works by reprogramming leukaemia cells back into normal cells.

Menin is involved in the complex machinery that gets hijacked by leukaemia cells and causes normal blood cells to turn into cancerous ones.

By using revumenib, Issa explained, the engine is turned off and leukaemia cells are turned back into normal cells, resulting in remission.

This formula has already saved 18 lives as part of the clinical trial, whose promising results were published this month in Nature.

The preliminary results showed that 53 per cent of patients responded to revumenib, and 30 per cent had a complete remission with no cancer