Which medicine is best when you are affected by cancer? This can vary from person to person. A new method can help people with a specific type of blood cancer get the best medicine for them.

“The new method can help those affected by chronic myelogenous leukemia,” says Jennifer Sheehan, a PhD research fellow from the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Production at NTNU. Sheehan was first author of a new publication in PLOS Computational Biology that describes the method.

The research is a collaboration between the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Linnaeus University in Sweden and the Universidade de São Paulo.

Blood cancer can develop insidiously

Chronic myelogenous leukemia, or CML, is a relatively rare variant of blood cancer. In Norway, around 70 people are affected per year.

The disease seems to be caused by a piece of one chromosome breaking off and attaching to another. This creates an abnormal gene that causes immature white blood cells to spread rapidly and fill the blood vessels. In other words, the patient gets cancer.

“CML is a form of cancer that many people live with for a long time without knowing it. Symptoms can be absent for several years before the patient becomes visibly ill,” says Astrid S. de Wijn, a professor at NTNU’s Department of Mechanical Engineering and Production, and Sheehan’s supervisor.

Finding the right medicine for CML

Today, the most effective form of treatment is stem cell transplantation. Many can avoid transplantation if they receive effective help with medication instead. The vast majority of people can manage without it, as long as they receive effective medications called thyrokinase inhibitors. But there are five different medications for CML, and it is important to find the one that is most effective.

The medications attack an enzyme. Enzymes are substances that are needed to start or keep various processes in the body going. The goal of the medications is to slow down the problematic overproduction of cells in the blood.

However, mutations, which are spontaneous changes in the cells, can cause the medications to lose all or part of their effect against blood cancer.

“We have developed a computer model that can help us say which drugs work best, and thus are best suited for each individual patient,” says Professor Ran Friedman at Linnaeus University.