New England Journal of Medicine: New treatment reduces risk of relapse or death in childhood leukemia by 61%

A group of researchers from Canada, the United States, and some other countries have announced the improvement of the situation related to the B-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia, which is very common among children. The respective study was published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

The team studied the results of treatment of the aforesaid disease in 1,440 children, obtained from 200 treatment centers in Canada, the United States, Australia, and New Zealand.

The treatments included standard chemotherapy with two cycles of blinatumomab, an immunotherapy used in relapsed leukemia.

Unlike chemotherapy, immunotherapy uses the body's own immune system to fight cancer by targeting cancer cells.

As the study showed, combining chemotherapy with immunotherapy reduced, by an average of 61 percent, the likelihood of relapse of or death from the B-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia.

For children at risk of relapse after three years, the chances of survival increased to 97.5 percent compared to 90 percent with chemotherapy alone.

And for younger patients at high risk of relapse, adding blinatumomab to chemotherapy increased the relapse-free rate from 85 percent to more than 94 percent.

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