Cancer Treatment Today

Gleevec is a drug initially approved for Chronic Myelogenous Leukemia but also studied for a variety of other conditions. It was studied for P. Vera at Weil-Cornell and the study was published in 2011. It treated 37 patients with polycythemia vera with Gleevec. The overall response rate was 49%. Thirty percent had a complete response, and 19%, a partial response. These are quite good results. On the other hand, a previous study by Nussenzveig et

  Many chemotherapeutic drugs cause neutropenia and guidelines now uniformly recommend G-CSF(granulocyte growth stimulating factors) prophylactically and therapeutically for chemotherapy. However, non-chemo drugs can also cause neutropenia. Among them are bcr-abl directed drugs used for CML, such as Gleevec. Depending on the stage, up to 70% of the patients treated with imatinib for CML experience an NCI grade 3 or 4 neutropenia or thrombocytopenia

Results from several randomized, placebo-controlled clinical trials for patients with primary gastrointestinal stromal tumor (GIST), a type of tumor usually found in the stomach or small intestine, showed that patients who received imatinib mesylate (Gleevec ®) after complete removal of their tumor were significantly less likely to have a recurrence of their cancer compared to those who did not receive imatinib. For example,  ACOSOG Z9001 trial