Arsenic promising against acute promyelocytic leukaemia

Arsenic may form the basis of a mainstream treatment for leukaemia, Iranian researchers reported on Wednesday at a cancer conference in Geneva.

“There have been a few studies done using arsenic…but we are the first group to suggest that it is acceptable as a first-line treatment,” Dr. Ardeshir Ghavamzadeh of Tehran University of Medical Sciences said in a statement. The researchers said arsenic was effective against acute promyelocytic leukaemia, or APL, a cancer of the blood and bone marrow that affects myeloid blood cells. APL, which affects 20,000 people worldwide, is most common in the elderly. It is a subtype of acute myeloid leukaemia, the most common form of adult leukaemia. Ninety percent of 63 patients who had not been previously treated for the illness had complete remission after two courses of the arsenic treatment. More than 88% were still alive with a mean survival time of nearly 34 months. “What this means is that we now have the possibility of offering APL patients a new first-line treatment that avoids conventional chemotherapy,” Dr. Ghavamzadeh concluded. The findings were presented at the EORTC-NCI-AACR Symposium on Molecular Targets and Cancer Therapeutics, sponsored by the European Organization for Research and Treatment of Cancer, the U.S. National Cancer Institute, and the American Association for Cancer Research. (Source: Reuters Health News: September 2004.)