Disrupted sleep is a common, often overlooked problem for pediatric patients being treated for acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL). To address this issue, researchers at Dana-Farber/Boston Children's Cancer and Blood Disorders ...
Oct 27, 2025
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Researchers from the Alliance for Clinical Trials in Oncology have found that two targeted immunotherapy drugs lead to high remission rates and long survival with reasonable side effects for older patients with a tough-to-treat ...
Oct 20, 2025
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Chinese researchers have developed a novel method to efficiently engineer natural killer (NK) cells for cancer immunotherapy. NK cells are central to early antiviral and anticancer defense—among other immune system roles—making ...
Oct 10, 2025
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Acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) is a form of leukemia, or cancer of the white blood cells characterized by excess lymphoblasts.
Malignant, immature white blood cells continuously multiply and are overproduced in the bone marrow. ALL causes damage and death by crowding out normal cells in the bone marrow, and by spreading (infiltrating) to other organs. ALL is most common in childhood with a peak incidence at 2–5 years of age, and another peak in old age. The overall cure rate in children is about 80%, and about 45%-60% of adults have long-term disease-free survival.
Acute refers to the relatively short time course of the disease (being fatal in as little as a few weeks if left untreated) to differentiate it from the very different disease of chronic lymphocytic leukemia, which has a potential time course of many years. It is interchangeably referred to as Lymphocytic or Lymphoblastic. This refers to the cells that are involved, which if they were normal would be referred to as lymphocytes but are seen in this disease in a relatively immature (also termed 'blast') state.
This text uses material from Wikipedia licensed under CC BY-SA
