Scientists have uncovered why patients with a rare type of blood cancer suffer from ineffective red blood cell production, and how vitamin B5 could be combined with existing drugs to improve outcomes.
Myelodysplastic syndromes (MDS) are a type of blood cancer characterised by a stem cell disorder where the production of healthy red blood cells goes wrong.
There are no curative treatments for these patients, but some medications do help to slow disease progression.
People with this disease often go on to develop acute myeloid leukaemia (AML) and around half become resistant to existing treatments for MDS within 18 months to two years of treatment.
In this study the team from Barts Cancer Institute at Queen Mary University of London and the Francis Crick Institute, analysed blood samples from 42 people with MDS.
They found that the enzyme COASY is critical in regulating red blood cell production in the bone marrow. Partial loss of the enzyme in MDS patients severely disrupts red blood cell production leading to anaemia.
They then tested whether they could boost red blood cell production using treatments including vitamin B5 supplementation.
Treatments with vitamin B5 or another metabolite, succinyl-CoA, increased the maturation of red blood cells.
Image credit | Science-Photo-Library
