Scientists thought they knew how this 70-year-old leukemia drug worked

For more than seven decades, doctors have used the drug 6-thioguanine (6-TG) to treat leukemia. Its effects in patients are well documented, but researchers are still working to understand the molecular details that determine why some cells are killed by the drug while others manage to withstand it.

A team at the CeMM Research Center for Molecular Medicine of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, working with scientists at the University of Oxford, the Weizmann Institute of Science and the University of Dundee, has now identified an unexpected factor in that response: a protein called NUDT5.