Cancer Currents Highlights: Recent Payoffs in Childhood Cancer Research by NCI

National Cancer Institute (NCI) shared on LinkedIn:

“In his Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Emperor of All Maladies, Siddhartha Mukherjee recounts the story of a team of NCI scientists – led by ‘The Emils’ Emil Freireich and Emil Frei – as they ran clinical trials testing combinations of chemotherapy drugs in the hopes of curing children with leukemia.

At that time, in the early 1960s, leukemia was uniformly fatal. Even so, the researchers came under intense scrutiny and criticism for wanting to give sick children multiple drugs – or ‘poisons,’ as some called them – at the same time.

Indeed, the treatments initially did make the children in the trial much sicker. ‘Then, unexpectedly – at a time when it was almost unbearable to look for it – there was a payoff,’ Mukherjee wrote. ‘The leukemia went into remission. The bone marrow biopsies came back one after another—all without leukemia cells.’

Now, most kids with acute lymphoblastic leukemia, the most common childhood cancer, are cured.

And although chemotherapy is still a mainstay of treating children with many forms of cancer, today’s treatment can include cutting-edge medications, such as personalized cell therapies and cleverly designed antibodies that can be stunningly effective.

But scientists aren’t only discovering ways to help children survive cancer. They’re also helping kids go on to live healthy lives by finding ways to limit or avoid the long-term side effects that have plagued many survivors of childhood cancers.

So, in case you missed them the first time around, the Cancer Currents stories below capture some of this progress. We hope you find these stories inspiring and informative.

As always, we welcome your feedback on Cancer Currents. And if you know somebody with an interest in these topics, please feel free to forward them this newsletter.

Carmen Phillips
Managing Editor, Cancer Currents”

Source: NCI/LinkedIn

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