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New Drug Halts Runaway Blood Cells In Bone Marrow

By Czerne M. Reid

Like a switch stuck in the on position, the bone marrow can churn out blood cells that bloat internal organs and clog blood vessels, leading to life-threatening disease.


"The disease has a path it's going to take and you need to be able to alter that path — our drug does that to a reasonable extent,"said Peter P. Sayeski, an associate professor of physiology and functional genomics in the UF College of Medicine, who led the research team.

The work, funded in part by the National Institutes of Health and the American Heart Association, is described in the Journal of Biological Chemistry.

The new drug, dubbed "G6" by the researchers, targets a group of life-threatening and hard-to-diagnose diseases called myeloproliferative neoplasms, or MPNs, that occur when the bone marrow cranks out too many red cells, white cells or platelets because of a mutant form of a protein called Jak2 that is key to blood cell formation. The condition is estimated to affect about 170,000 people in the United States, according to data from the MPN Research Foundation, also known as the MPD Foundation.

"These bone marrow cells are replicating and growing out of control because one very important protein is stuck in the on position,"said Dr. Christopher R. Cogle, an associate professor of hematology/oncology in the UF College of Medicine and a member of the UF Shands Cancer Center.

The result is blood counts so high they elevate patients' risk of stroke, bleeding, infection and blood clots in various parts of the body. Ironically, the condition can also lead to low blood cell count and anemia symptoms, because it impedes the flow of normal cells from the bone marrow into the blood stream.

Doctors typically treat patients for years with low-dose oral chemotherapy that keeps the disease in check, but doesn't cure it. And long-term chemotherapy carries its own risk of secondary blood cancers and leukemia, and of depressing normal blood cell counts.

The UF researchers, along with colleagues at the University of South Florida, Heriot-Watt University in the United Kingdom and Budapest University of Technology and Economics in Hungary, used computer technology to identify a chemical compound that can bind to the mutant protein and, in effect, turn it off. The compound belongs to a family called stilbenoids, which are known to slow cell growth and have antioxidant and tumor-suppressing properties.

In laboratory studies of cell cultures and in mice, the new drug reduced swelling in the spleen, corrected the unhealthily low ratio of white to red blood cells in the bone marrow and decreased the percentage of immature blood cells circulating through the body.

"What makes this interesting is that we altered the disease in the bone marrow,"said Sayeski, who is also a member of the UF Shands Cancer Center. "If you're not treating the source, then you can't cure these patients.”


Peter Sayeski,