Promising drug cuts tumor metabolism

From Washington, D.C., at a meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research

Early safety trials of an experimental medicine suggest that it could be used for treating several serious cancers.

Gastrointestinal stromal tumor, or GIST, is an unusual but highly lethal form of cancer. Two years ago, George Demetri of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston and his colleagues demonstrated that the drug imatinib, also called Gleevec, can dramatically shrink tumors in people with GIST (SN: 5/26/01, p.