Posted on behalf of Meredith Wadman

Imatinib (trade name Gleevec), the drug that rose to fame as a potent and lasting treatment for chronic myeloid leukemia and some other cancers has recently shown a tantalizing aptitude for targeting autoimmune diseases as well.

Both in mice with auto-immune hepatitis and arthritis and in case reports from patients with rheumatoid arthritis ,

psoriasis and Crohn’s disease, the thinking is that the drug, a tyrosine kinase inhibitor, is working by dampening the immune response.

Now Cedric Louvet, a postdoc in Jeffrey Bluestone’s lab at the University of California, San Francisco and colleagues have asked what Gleevec will do in what is possibly the most infamous autoimmune disease of them all: juvenile diabetes, also known as type I diabetes, in which the body’s immune system attacks and eventually destroys the insulin-producing β cells of the pancreas. The answer they found is exciting, if highly preliminary.

Louvet and his team report this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that Gleevec cured 80% of mice afflicted with new cases of type I diabetes. Treating the mice for ten weeks led to long-lasting remission. (The diabetes reappeared in the mice when they were only treated for three weeks.) What’s more, seven weeks of treatment with the drug prevented the onset of diabetes in 80% of mice that weren’t yet diabetic but were engineered to get the disease. The protective effect was still working in a majority of them nearly one year later. Another tyrosine kinase-inhibiting drug, sunitinib (trade name Sutent), had similar effects.

The authors suggest that the drug may be throwing a wrench in the inflammatory works by targeting a tyrosine kinase that’s intimately involved in the immune response.