Cancer Drug Shows Promise for Treating a Wide Range of Inflammatory Diseases

ScienceDaily (June 30, 2010) — Those looking for a new treatment for a range of inflammatory diseases like arthritis, multiple sclerosis, inflammatory bowel disease, and lupus may need to look no further than a drug already available for treating cancer.


In a research report published in the July 2010 print issue of the Journal of Leukocyte Biology, Japanese scientists use mice to show that bortezomib, currently used to treat cancers that affect white blood cells, induces cell death only in harmful (active and proliferating) T cells, leaving the rest unharmed. If the results prove true in humans, it offers hope that this drugs or others similar to it might be used to treat inflammatory diseases without the side effects of current drugs that affect all T cells equally.

"Unfortunately, there are a lot of people who are suffering from autoimmune and inflammatory disease," said Koichi Yanaba, M.D., Ph.D., a scientist from the Department of Dermatology at Nagasaki University Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences who was involved in the research. "We believe that this new-type remedy for autoimmune and inflammatory disease could successfully treat them in the near future."

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