Blog

Daniel Flora: Living Proof – Stories of remarkable successes right from my clinic

Daniel Flora/accru.org

Apr 5, 2025, 07:04

Daniel Flora: Living Proof – Stories of remarkable successes right from my clinic

Daniel Flora, Medical Director of Oncology Research at St. Elizabeth Healthcare, shared a post on LinkedIn:

“I’m starting a new series on Substack called Living Proof. Stories of remarkable successes right from my clinic. Sharing these real-life cases I hope sheds a positive light on how far we have come in cancer care.

Living Proof: Outliving Cancer

One of my longtime patients passed away this week. She was 95. It wasn’t cancer. Just old age.

She was kind and funny. The kind of person who made you smile as soon as she walked into clinic. I was lucky to know her.

She was diagnosed with chronic myelogenous leukemia (CML) in 2010, already in her 80s. Not long before that, this would have meant just a few years of survival. But she started Gleevec, a targeted therapy that blocks BCR-ABL, the protein that drives CML.

Her blood counts normalized. Her energy returned. She stayed on treatment for several years, then came off. Her remission held.

She lived 15 more years. Her cancer never came back.

She got to keep living her life on her terms. That is the kind of outcome we hope for.

CML is one of the clearest examples of how far we have come. A disease that was once fatal is now manageable for most, and in some cases, treatable without transplant or lifelong therapy.

For those interested in the science:

CML is caused by a mutation called the Philadelphia chromosome. It fuses two genes, BCR and ABL, creating an abnormal protein that tells the bone marrow to keep making white blood cells.

Gleevec (imatinib) was the first drug developed to target that protein. It was the beginning of precision oncology.

Here is a good review of the long-term outcomes.”

“Long-Term Outcomes of Imatinib Treatment for Chronic Myeloid Leukemia”

Daniel Flora: Living Proof - Stories of remarkable successes right from my clinic