Cancer wonder drug can cause heart failure.

Writing in Nature Medicine, scientists report that Gleevec, a very successful member of a new class of anti-cancer drugs, can cause heart failure. The reason? The target of Gleevec is found in cancer cells and in heart cells, allowing side effects leading to heart problems.

Gleevec is a member of a new family of drugs called tyrosine-kinase inhibitors, working to turn off certain enzymes required for cancer cells to grow. The current report started when 10 patients on Gleevec reported to the University of Texas' M.D. Anderson Cancer Center with severe heart problems. By probing for possible links, the researchers, led by Dr. Thomas Force proved that Gleevec also affected enzymes in the heart. As Dr Force explains:

While the cancer is treated effectively, there will be some percentage of patients who could experience significant left ventricular dysfunction and even heart failure from this. Gleevec is a wonderful drug and patients with these diseases need to be on it. We're trying to call attention to the fact that Gleevec and other similar drugs coming along could have significant side effects on the heart and clinicians need to be aware of this.

This part of heart biology is new to us, so we did learn something new from this accident. What we can now do is optimize the drugs to ignore the heart targets and focus better on the cancer cell targets. Luckily, we have a whole new host of drugs from this class in the pipeline, so we can screen them better and assess their toxicity.

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