Expression of a cellular enzyme could predict the response of patients with acute myeloid leukemia (AML) to chemotherapy, according to new research.
-----
Related Content
Personalized Genomic Framework Predicts Treatment Outcomes for Patients with AML
Leukemia Cancer Cells With TP53 Mutations Respond to Mild Chemotherapy
-----
Patients with AML are routinely treated with chemotherapy, because it is not currently possible to know which patients will benefit. However, only a portion of patients will respond to the treatment, with serious side effects occurring in non-responders. Thus, researchers having been searching for a way of predicting which patients with AML are most likely to respond to chemotherapy.
In a study from Goethe University Frankfurt (Germany), published in Nature Medicine, researchers investigated the effects of the anti-cancer drug cytarabine on AML cells and discovered that the drug’s toxicity in AML cells correlates with expression of the cellular enzyme SAMHD1. Further research showed that SAMHD1 renders cytarabine inactive by removing phosphate residues from cytarabine’s active form.
Therefore, the researchers posited that the enzyme’s expression could predict the sensitivity of AML cells to cytarabine. This was confirmed by showing that SAMHD1 levels in AML cells predicted the response of patients with AML to cytarabine-based chemotherapy with high accuracy.
Researchers concluded that SAMHD1 can be used as a clinical biomarker to guide the use of cytarabine-based treatment in patients with AML.
The study also spurned new hope for patients with AML who currently cannot be effectively treated with existing therapy. Researchers found that SAMHD1 sensitizes cytarabine-resistant AML cells to cytarabine-based chemotherapy, opening the possibility of a combination therapy for this disease in patients who would otherwise be unresponsive to treatment.
