FROM:
(2017-12-07), National cooperative group trial seeks to cut in half early mortality rates for rare leukemia, Politics & Government Week, 307, ISSN: 1944-270X, BUTTER® ID: 014806532
By a News Reporter-Staff News Editor at Politics & Government Week -- AUGUSTA, Ga. () - A national cooperative group trial is making a handful of the country’s experts in a rare leukemia available around the clock, with the goal of cutting by more than half the high mortality rates that occur in the difficult first few weeks of treatment.
Induction mortality for treatment of acute promyelocytic leukemia, or APL, can be as high as 30 percent, but for patients who survive those first few weeks, survival rates can soar beyond 90 percent, making it the most- curable leukemia.
“The most frustrating problem in APL is what we call early deaths,” says the National Cancer Institute-supported cooperative’s study chair and principal investigator Dr. Anand P. Jillella. Jillella is chief of the Division of Hematology/Oncology at the Medical College of Georgia and associate director of medical oncology services at the Georgia Cancer Center at Augusta University.
“Those rates have not changed in the last two decades despite having blockbuster drugs to treat patients. …
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