Leukaemia: Treatment advances
Consultant paediatric haematologist Professor Owen Smith said the improvement in treatment outcome was perhaps the single greatest achievement in all cancer therapy over the past 50 years.
Prof Smith, of Our Lady’s Hospital for Sick Children in Crumlin, Dublin, said the “impressive improvement” was achieved by the fine-tuning and combining of drugs already in existence.
He pointed out that no new chemical substances to treat the disease had become available over the last three decades.
But the professor told the conference that curing the remaining 15% of children with the disease would be difficult.
Further improvements in the cure rate could only be achieved with increased knowledge of the disease and further advances in treatments.
“The advances that have been in childhood with acute lymphoblastic leukaemia (ALL) are now being applied to adolescents and young adults with lymphoid malignancies with impressive outcomes — reminding us that the treatment of childhood ALL continues to serve as a paradigm to improve outcome for all human cancers,” he said.
