Nano medicine to improve treatment of Leukaemia

Kochi-based Amrita Centre for Nanosciences and Molecular Medicine has developed a new nano-medicine that it claims can improve treatment of drug resistant Chronic Myelogenous Leukaemia when used in combination with Imatinib, the standard drug for the disease.
In another invention, the 2006-founded Amrita Centre has devised a mechanism to effectively prevent recurrence of Glioma, or brain tumour - a deadly disease that affects four out of every 100,000 people in India.
The life expectancy of high-grade glioma patients is about one to two years, a press release here said.
The two projects will be formally unveiled on Sept 26 at Amritavarsham60: the 60th Birthday Celebrations of Mata Amritanandamayi.

As for CML, it affects approximately two out of every 100,000 people in India annually. Almost 40 per cent of these cases are resistant to Imatinib. For such patients, treatment options are extremely limited.
"What we have done at Amrita is to take a particular 'small-molecule inhibitor' class of anti-cancer drug that is currently available in the market and encapsulate it into a protein nano-capsule," says Dr Shantikumar Nair, the Centre's director.
"This allows the drug to be absorbed directly into the cancer cells circulating in the patient's bloodstream. This has a marked increase on its efficacy in killing the cancer cells. Further, the circulation lifetime of the drug in the blood is increased, which also increases its efficacy," he added.