Acute Lymphoblastic Leukaemia: A New Drug Class In Cancer Therapy
Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
Acute lymphoblastic leukaemia (ALL) is a rare form of cancer that commonly affects children, mostly under the age of five years. In the search for new therapeutic options, researchers at Vetmeduni Vienna have now discovered a new mechanism of the disease process and have developed a novel drug treatment line that is pioneering for future cancer therapies. The groundbreaking study was recently published in Nature Communications.
During their search for new therapeutic options for acute lymphoblastic leukaemia (ALL), a team of researchers at Vetmeduni Vienna have discovered a new function for a special enzyme, cyclin-dependent kinase 8 (CDK8), as part of the signalling system in ALL.
Most important for future therapies is the presence of a therapeutic window: healthy blood cells are not affected by the absence of CDK8, while the leukaemic cells need CDK8 to survive.
Using leukaemia mouse models, first author Ingeborg Menzl from the Institute of Pharmacology and Toxicology at Vetmeduni Vienna and her colleagues demonstrated that CDK8-deficient leukaemia cells show an increase in cell death.
"Of note is that the function of CDK8 in ALL is independent of enzymatic activity, which means that conventional kinase inhibitors are ineffective," says Menzl. Based on this finding, the research team asked for potential interaction partners and discovered a previously unknown link between CDK8 and the mTOR signalling pathway in cancer cells.
Original Paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-12656-x
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