About Leukaemia trials at CTSU
CTSU conducts national and international randomised trials in several types of leukaemia, maintaining long-term follow-up of mortality and major morbidity, analysing their results [53-64] and helping to report them.
In many types of leukaemia, long-term survival continues to improve steadily from one decade to the next, due to progressively more effective treatments and better supportive care. For example, in children the most common leukaemia is acute lymphoblastic leukaemia (ALL), and over 90% of those diagnosed in the UK are entered in the national trials. Previously, those trials demonstrated improved long-term survival with intensive blocks of chemotherapy [64], so that over 80% survival rates can now be expected.
One important question currently being addressed is whether a stem cell transplant from a related donor is beneficial for all adult ALL patients, by comparing according to the genetic randomisation of whether a related donor is available or not. Autologous transplants are also being investigated in randomised trials in various diseases. To increase the ability to answer these questions reliably, considerable effort is now being put into increasing patient numbers by extending collaboration in the MRC trials internationally (for example, working with the EBMT and US ECOG group) and by conducting collaborative meta-analyses.
Back to Leukaemia trials.
