Childhood Leukemia study reveals disease subtypes, New Treatment, Phase 1 trial begins

A new study of acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL), a blood cancer that primarily affects young children, has revealed that the disease has two distinct subtypes, and provides preliminary evidence that about 13 percent of ALL cases may be successfully treated with targeted drugs that have proved highly effective in the treatment of lymphomas in adults.
Usually emerging in children between 2 and 5 years of age, ALL occurs when the proliferation of white blood cells known as lymphocytes spirals out of control. The current standard of care for ALL employs high doses of chemotherapy that usually cure the disease, but may also have serious long-term effects on brain development, bone growth and fertility, so there is an unmet need for better therapies.
In addition to discovering the two ALL subtypes, the researchers, led by scientists from UC San Francisco and Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU), developed a simple lab test that determines whether patients fall into the less-common subtype that may respond to targeted therapy. One author of the new study, affiliated with MD Anderson Cancer Center in Texas, is already using this new test to recruit patients for a Phase 1 clinical trial evaluating the use of targeted drugs for ALL.
“Children are given high doses of chemotherapy for ALL because they are considered more resilient than adults, but there are long-term consequences that may not be obvious in childhood,” Müschen said. “Our idea is that by adding these new drugs we can reduce the amount of conventional chemotherapy or even replace it. In our experiments with mice, both combination therapy with low-dose chemotherapy and single-agent targeted therapy each worked very well. The new clinical trial using the BCL-6 biomarker should begin to bring us the answers.”