Dr. Valerie Brown, clinical director of the Pediatric Hematology/Oncology Experimental Therapeutics Program at Penn State Hershey Children’s Hospital, said that although cancer treatment has improved substantially over the last 50 years, there’s still a long way to go.
Survival rates have doubled from 40 percent to 80 percent among standard risk patients since the 1970s, Brown said. That’s the good news. But one out of five children still die from the disease.
“We’ve sort of reached our limitations for how to shuffle the different standard chemotherapy agents,” she said. “We have used these drugs as intensely as possible and in as many different combinations as possible.”
“We’ve reached the limit with these drugs, and yet a proportion of children will still die from their cancer,” Brown said.
That is why Brown and other pediatric oncologists and researchers have focused their efforts on understanding what gives high-risk patients’ cancer cells a survival advantage. Her expertise is acute lymphoblastic leukemia or ALL, the most common childhood cancer.
Recent findings have revealed a “kinase signature” genetically programmed within the leukemia cells in patients who have a harder time achieving remission. Those patients are predominantly Hispanic and Native American. This discovery has led to the incorporation of novel drugs that target this “kinase signature.” Brown believes this discovery will lead to genetic testing of a patient’s cancer cells in order to personalize the treatment course as being the standard at the time of a cancer diagnosis.
