The recovery rate for childhood acute lymphoblastic leukemia is greater than 70% now. The improvements in newly diagnosed patients’ biologic characterization are partly responsible for the accomplishments that were attained. Contemporary treatment protocols are reliant on this information to customize therapy to the risk of relapse of a patient. Conventional antimetabolite-based therapy can be utilized to treat patients with suitable genetic features, for instance, hyperdiploidy or the TEL-AML1 fusion. The treatment can minimize long-term side effects. On the other hand, candidates for allogeneic hematopoietic stem cell transplantation in the first remission include extremely high-risk patients, for instance, infants with MLL gene rearrangements and cases with BCR-ABL fusion and poor early response.
Identifying new genetic subgroups of ALL and developing new therapies that can precisely aim the ALL translocations’ oncogenic products are the areas that can be covered in further studies in this field.
Link:theoncologist.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1634/theoncologist.2-6-374
