Will New Anemia Drug Top Current T...(sease or chemotherapy if it turns out to...),Health

"That's speculation," he said. "There is no way our paper suggests that, and there is no hard scientific evidence that would suggest that."

Dr. H. Franklin Bunn, research director of the hematology division at Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School, both in Boston, and author of an accompanying journal editorial, said that "down the road this drug may have some advantages over regular erythropoietin drugs."

But he said it is too early to tell whether Hematide can replace the erythropoietin drugs Procrit and Aranesp, which are associated with heightened risk of heart attack, cancer and stroke.

For now, Hematide is "the treatment of choice for patients who have developed antibodies against erythropoietin. And that's all you can say at this point. but I am curious to find out whether this drug will be able to be used and be effective and safe in a wider setting," Bunn said.

Other experts are more optimistic. Dr. Charles Bennett, a hematologist/oncologist at Northwestern Memorial Hospital and Jesse Brown VA Medical Center in Chicago, said that "we are going to look at this in five years and see that it's a breakthrough paper."

It's hoped this drug will take the place of erythropoietin drugs and not have the side effects associated with them, Bennett said.

Dr. Jochen Reiser, chief of nephrology and hypertension at the Leonard M. Miller School of Medicine of the University of Miami, voiced similar hopes. "In some patients where Procrit has proven not to be beneficial, maybe this peptide has an additional potential that Procrit doesn't have or works better."

Whether Hematide will overcome the side effects associated with Procrit is still hard to say, Reiser said.

"If the side effects come from increasing the amount of red blood cells
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