Blood cancer sufferers could be treated with a simple arthritis drug, according to scientists at a leading British university. Researchers have found that methotrexate (MTX) a drug on the World Health Organisation list of essential medicines and commonly used to treat arthritis - works by directly inhibiting the molecular pathway responsible for causing the disease. Although it is still used for treatment of Breast cancer and Choriocarcinoma and trophoblastic disease too.
Initial tests were carried out on fruit fly cells to screen for small molecules that modulate JAK/STAT signalling a pathway whose misregulation is central to the development in humans of Myeloproliferative neoplasms (MPNs), the collective term for progressive blood cancers like Polycythemia Vera (PV). PV is a type of blood cancer which causes an overproduction of red blood cells. Further testing in human cells showed…
