Source: The BBC
A drug used to treat diabetes could help in the fight against blood cancer, early research in the journal Nature suggests.
An international team of scientists gave the drug to patients with chronic myeloid leukaemia, alongside standard treatment.
Those who received the combination therapy were more likely to be free of the disease for longer.
Chronic myeloid leukaemia (CML) is a rare blood cancer.
Boosting treatment
About 600 people are diagnosed with the condition each year in the UK.
Though a number of successful treatments exist, they do not help every patient and some become resistant to conventional therapy.
In this study, scientists gave a combination of the anti-diabetic drug pioglitazone and standard treatment to 24 patients whose CML remained active despite receiving conventional drugs.
After 12 months, more than 50% of the patients given the combination treatment were in remission.
And the first three patients to be given the drug had no reoccurrences of cancer in the five years that followed…read the full article.
