Leukemia Drug May Treat Type-1 Diabetes

Filed in archive Drugs, Vaccines and Therapeutics on November 20, 2008

Leukemia Drug Imatinib (Trade name: Gleevec) has been shown in animal trials to have potentials to prevent and even reverse type 1 diabetes.

[snip] they found that treating mice with Imatinib or a similar inhibitor drug for seven weeks before the onset of auto-immune (type 1) diabetes prevented development of the disease long after the treatment was stopped.

Only 20 per cent of the animals treated with Imatinib became progressively diabetic by 30 weeks of age, as opposed to 71 per cent of those who did not have the drug.

The majority of imatinib-treated mice remained non-diabetic at 50 weeks of age, suggesting that the short-term therapy had long-term effects on the development of diabetes.

The drug put 80 per cent of mice with existing disease into remission when mice were treated for eight to 10 weeks after disease onset.

These findings suggest that the cancer drug could be used to treat type 1 diabetes and, possibly, other auto-immune diseases. However, trials are needed to confirm whether the drug confers the same effect on humans.