Novel Therapeutic Strategies in Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia

Abstract

Chemotherapy cures only a minority of adult patients with acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL). In addition, relapsed ALL has a poor outcome with 5-year survival as low as 7 %. Hence, there is a need to develop effective therapies to treat relapsed disease and to combine these agents with chemotherapy to improve outcomes in newly diagnosed patients. ALL cells express several antigens amenable to target therapies including CD19, CD20, CD22, and CD52. Over the last decade, there has been a surge in the development of immune therapies which target these receptors and that have induced robust responses. In this manuscript, we review these novel immune agents in the treatment of B-ALL. As these new therapies mature, the challenge going forward will be to find safe and effective combinations of these agents with chemotherapy and to determine their place in the current treatment schema.

Endoglin: a novel target for therapeutic intervention in acute leukemias revealed in xenograft mouse models

“…35,36 For ALL, although significant progress has been made in the last decade, in cases of refractory or relapsed ALL, second-line chemotherapy has shown poor effect, rarely resulting in long-term survival. 37,38 Thus, there is a critical need for new therapeutic options. Monoclonal antibodies are promising agents because they deliver their therapeutic effects with minimal toxicity.…”

Nursing care of a child with acute lymphoblastic leukemia

“…Already at this stage there may be adverse changes in the tissues, despite the fact that the affected cell may look normal. Typically, tissue hypertrophy also occurs at this time [10][11][12].…”

P53-MDM2 Pathway: Evidences for A New Targeted Therapeutic Approach in B-Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia

“…It prevalently occurs, however, in childhood, in whom the prognosis is more favorable respect to adult patients, reaching a cure rate of 80–90% thanks to multi-agent and intensive combination chemotherapy regimens that have significantly improved the outcome in the pediatric setting (Hunger and Mullighan, 2015; Pui et al, 2015), as well as in that of adolescent and younger adults (Curran and Stock, 2015). In other patients, instead, “conventional” treatments remain unsatisfactory (Marks, 2015; Al Ustwani et al, 2016; Fedorov et al, 2016), due to pharmacologic resistance (Ronson et al, 2016; Seiter, 2016) or toxicity events, above all when aggressive “pediatric-like” protocols are applied (Dias et al, 2016). …”