Targeting the Pim kinases in multiple myeloma.

Multiple myeloma (MM) is a plasma cell malignancy that remains incurable. Novel treatment strategies to improve survival are urgently required. The Pims are a small family of serine/threonine kinases with increased expression across the hematological malignancies. Pim-2 shows highest expression in MM and constitutes a promising therapeutic target. It is upregulated by the bone marrow microenvironment to mediate proliferation and promote MM survival. Pim-2 also has a key role in the bone destruction typically seen in MM. Additional putative roles of the Pim kinases in MM include trafficking of malignant cells, promoting oncogenic signaling in the hypoxic bone marrow microenvironment and mediating resistance to therapy. A number of Pim inhibitors are now under development with lead compounds entering the clinic. The ATP-competitive Pim inhibitor LGH447 has recently been reported to have single agent activity in MM. It is anticipated that Pim inhibition will be of clinical benefit in combination with standard treatments and/or with novel drugs targeting other survival pathways in MM.

Comparison of various methods for rapid glucose estimation.

We studied the accuracy of three techniques for the rapid estimation of the blood glucose concentration with reagent strips in samples of blood from inpatients with diabetes mellitus. We observed that the visual inspection of Dextrostix gave results that were too inaccurate for this technique to be of practical clinical benefit. In contrast, when performed by registered nurses, both the Dextrostix-Eyetone method and the visual inspection of Chemstrips yielded results that were closely correlated with the measured serum glucose concentrations. With both of the latter techniques, less than 11% of the determinations varied from the actual serum glucose concentration by more than 20%. We conclude that both these techniques are sufficiently accurate to be of potential use in the home monitoring of blood glucose concentrations.