Photo: Manuello Paganelli

HHMI's Brian J. Druker on the Cancer "Miracle Drug"
Thirty years into the war on cancer, virtually everyone involved has learned that even cautious optimism can often seem wildly over-enthusiastic. But lately, the cancer research community has been heating up on the subject of Gleevec (imatinib mesylate, also marketed internationally under the trade name Glivec), a drug treatment for chronic myelogenous leukemia (CML) that even the journal Nature has described as legitimately earning the title of "miracle drug." As Nature put it, the compound is "the proof of principle than you can block a pathway that cancer cells depend on." And it’s the proof of principle that understanding the molecular mechanisms that go awry in cancer cells can lead to therapies that will stop the disease.
   Gleevec began life in the late 1980s as a compound known as STI571, synthesized by Ciba Geigy to inhibit tyrosine kinase oncogenes. Brian J. Druker, who is based at the Oregon Health & Science University Cancer Institute, Portland, then put it to work on the tyrosine kinase that was known to be activated in CML. It was Druker’s lab that did the basic work showing that STI571 had potential, and Druker who talked...