(AOF) – AB Science today announces a case report from the initial phase of its Phase I/II study (AB18) evaluating AB8939, a microtubule destabilizer, in patients with refractory acute myeloid leukemia (AML) and recurrent. The AML patient in question had failed previous treatment with azacitidine and had a rearrangement of the Mecom gene which is a biomarker of resistance to standard chemotherapies, associated with a high risk of disease progression and a risk of recurrence. .
One month after the first treatment cycle (i.e. three consecutive days of AB8939 treatment), there was a drastic reduction in the number of bone marrow blast cells (i.e. leukemia cells), which went from a level of 55% before treatment to a level of 5% after treatment (i.e. a morphological state without leukaemia). Remarkably, this response was achieved at a very low dose of AB8939, corresponding to the second step of dose escalation (out of 13 potential steps) in phase I.
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Loss of speed in European research
European research is losing ground to American and Chinese research. In twenty years, Europe’s share has fallen from 41% to 31% in global R&D. China’s share jumped from 1% to 8%. As for the United States, which supplanted Europe, in 2001 it devoted only 2 billion euros per year more than Europe to R&D, whereas now this gap has reached 25 billion! Some experts accuse the European authorities of not having deployed effective policies. The financing of pharmaceutical research should therefore have been better targeted via the “Horizon 2020” programme. France only comes in eighteenth position in European funding despite the quality of its research. Conversely, the United States concentrates funding on Boston and a few centers of excellence.