GU researchers find new indicator of leukaemic drug resistance

AHMEDABAD: About a quarter of the patients undergoing treatment for chronic myeloid leukemia (CML) worldwide show resistance to the most prevalent drugs within one year of therapy. A team from bio-informatics department of Gujarat University (GU) has devised a mechanism to understand the specific drug resistance even before the treatment is commenced.
The study was conducted by a team consisting of Dr Saumya Patel, his guide Dr Rakesh Rawal and doctoral student Krupa Shah.Dr Patel, assistant professor, has received the American Association of Cancer Research (AACR)’s Global Scholar-in-Training Awards (GSITA) for this work.
He is the only researcher from India among 15 recipients that included scholars from Brazil, Turkey, China and South Africa to name a few. The GSITA is given to researchers from developing nations to apply the research outcomes to their local communities using access to international network of cancer research.
“The work includes a protein called Organic Cation Transporter-1 (OCT-1) which is involved in influx of drugs in CML patients. We took a total of 120 CML patients including 30 from chronic patients and 20 healthy individuals as control samples. We also took the samples from stem cell donors for OCT-1 analysis,” he said. The three-year study culminated in the finding that OCT-1 can work as a potential confounder of developing Imatinib drug resistance among others in a CML patient. “Benefit of the method would be to understand the drug resistance in a patient and devise a treatment on the basis of results,” said Dr Patel.
The team members said that animal trials of the method is already on for standardizing the procedure. After success of the same, the human trials can be next on cards, they added.