Suddenly and without warning, blood cancer can affect people of all ages. In the case of a particularly aggressive form, acute myeloid leukemia, every week counts. However, researchers at Dresden University Medicine have now tested a new combination of known drugs that could give significantly more patients a real chance of recovery.
Acute myeloid leukemia, or AML for short, is a malignant disease of the blood. In this condition, abnormal blood cells grow uncontrollably and crowd out healthy ones. Chemotherapy can often push the disease back. However, it returns in many patients, which makes treatment much more difficult. Only around 40 percent of patients achieve what doctors call remission with conventional therapy – a state in which the disease can no longer be detected. Only patients who reach this stage can receive a stem cell transplant. In this procedure, diseased bone marrow cells are replaced with healthy donor stem cells. For many patients, this is the only chance of a long-term cure.
Research from Dresden making a difference
The nationwide study was led by Dresden physician Prof. Christoph Röllig and conducted at multiple clinics across Germany as part of the Study Alliance Leukemia (SAL). "When AML returns, the chances of long-term survival drop significantly," explains Röllig. The goal is to get patients into a condition where a stem cell transplant becomes possible in the first place. The new therapy appears to make this possible for many more patients. Prof. Uwe Platzbecker, Medical Director of Dresden University Hospital, emphasizes the importance of the findings: "The results represent a major step forward because they give us new and effective options to improve patients’ chances of reaching a life-saving stem cell transplant."
The new therapy is not a distant prospect. According to Röllig, more than 150 additional AML patients have already been treated with the regimen outside the study. The first results are promising. This means the approach developed in Dresden has a good chance of being used more widely in the future and improving treatment options for patients whose leukemia has returned.
Publication:
Venetoclax plus high-dose cytarabine and mitoxantrone as salvage treatment for relapsed or refractory acute myeloid leukaemia (RELAX): a multicentre, single-arm, phase 1/2 trial, Ruhnke, Leo et al., The Lancet Haematology, Volume 13, Issue 3, e157 - e168
