A Drug Bringing Less Side Effects to Leukemia Patients is Undergoing Researches

Posted by Alex Brown on February 29th, 2016

Ibrutinib is an advanced drug for chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia (CLL) treatment, achieving by inhibiting Bruton’s tyrosine kinase (BTK). It can help to extend the lives of patients who could only stay live several months with the traditional treatment to years even decades. However behind the good medical effect is the adverse side effect-bleeding, which drove the need for a safer drug, then acalabrutinib (ACP-196), another BTK inhibitor came into the sight of scientists.

The reason that ibrutinib increases the risk of bleeding is that it influence the activity of platelets that works to stop bleeding, and makes them hard to form clots. Acalabrutinib extremes all advantages ibrutinib carries while avoid such side effects. In a 14 months long phase l/ll clinical trial on 61 CLL patients, there was no bleeding events appeared as off-target effects of the treatment.

The participants of the phase l/ll study were all diagnosed with relapsed CLL, and they were given acalabrutinib in oral form for a period of 14 months, during which the most common side effect present as headache (in 43% of the patients), diarrhea (in 39%), and increased weight, and all of these side effects were in a relatively light stage. And not all patients in the study suffered from these unwanted effects, accounting for about 5%.

The exact reason for the difference on the side effects between the two tyrosine kinase inhibitors mainly is that ibrutinib also treats other molecules that are vital for the platelets normal activities while targeting Brutono’s tyrosine kinase. Whilst acalabrutinib can carry out the given mission with higher precision and bring less influence to other molecules.

But yet it can’t say that acalabrutinib is a safe as a drug for CLL treatment as there were only few sample patients involved. It’s overall profile should be checked by more studies and clinical trials, which won’t be too far to find out that for that it now attracts many related organizations’ attention, and more parts join in driven by the urgent needs.

The clinical trial report can be accessed at ACP-196, a Novel Bruton Tyrosine Kinase (Btk) Inhibitor, for Treatment of Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia, and the research paper is available at Acalabrutinib (ACP-196) in Relapsed Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia with the doi number being 10.1056/NEJMoa1509981.

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BOC Sciences is a professional research and bulk chemical supplier in USA. Screening libraries including kinase inhibitor, tyrosine kinase inhibitor, target selective inhibitor and inhibitor libraries are available there. For more information, please visit the official website.