Ibrutinib & Friends

Just on the heels of good news about Ibrutinib last month, more very exciting news about its cousins -- the other treatments known as Kinase Inhibitors. Apparently, as good as they have been so far, there's a chance we're not even using them at their full potential.

This morning, Medical News Today published a commentary on an article in the journal Nature Chemical Biology that described  a study of four Kinase Inhibitors. While Ibrutinib was not among the four, one of the findings of the study was that Kinase Inhibitors tend to all work the same, so we can perhaps assume that Ibrutinib can be included in this good news.

The study found that Kinase Inhibitors do m ore than what we assumed -- keep cancer cells from growing by blocking certain enzymes (kinases) from working. But there's more to it than that. In higher doses than are currently used, Kinase Inhibitors keep kinases from joining up with something called the Hsp90-Cdc37 chaperone system, which the article describes as "a complex of molecules in cells which play a vital role in the stability of proteins." It doesn't give a whole lot more detail about what that means, which is fine. The important thing is, if we use higher doses of something that already seems to work, then it will work even better. And there's also some indication that not only will a Kinase Inhibitor stop the kinases, it might also be able to destroy them.

According to the article, there are 25 Kinase Inhibitors being used right now (including two for Non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma: Ibrutinib and GS-1101, which several people in the support group have used with some success), and another 400 in development (not sure how many of them are targeted for NHL, but I'm guessing it's a few).

So, to sum things up: Kinase Inhibitors work -- for lots of different cancers, including NHL. They might work even better in different doses. It will be interesting to see how all of this is handled from here. Will trials start up quickly for the four that are discussed in the article? Will others follow quickly? Will doctors go off label on their own and see what happens? There's no mention in the article about possible side effects from higher doses, which certainly needs to be considered.

But, as always, an article like this brings just a little bit more hope.