Efficacy of tyrosine kinase inhibitors on a mouse chronic myeloid leukemia model and chronic myeloid leukemia stem cells

Abstract Chronic myeloid leukemia (CML) is a hematopoietic stem cell disorder caused by constitutively active BCR-ABL1 tyrosine kinase resulting from the t(9;22) Philadelphia translocation. Imatinib, a BCR-ABL1 tyrosine kinase inhibitor (TKI), is a revolutionary molecular target inhibitor for CML. However, leukemic stem cells (LSCs) eventually become resistant to imatinib and thereby cause relapse. The next generation BCR-ABL1 TKI dasatinib is also unable to eliminate CML LSCs. On the other hand, the third generation BCR-ABL1 TKI ponatinib is not well-studied in terms of its efficacy on CML LSCs. Here, we evaluate the efficacy of ponatinib against CML LSC-containing lin−Sca-1+c-Kit+ (LSK) cells using a mouse CML-like model. To this end, we compared the efficacy of imatinib, dasatinib and ponatinib on CML LSK cells and showed that ponatinib is more effective at eliminating CML LSK cells. Our results suggest that ponatinib could be potentially useful for achieving treatment-free remission in CML patients.