Every year, thousands die of various types of cancer. Leukemia, for example, accounts to over 50,000 cases and more than 24,000 deaths in 2014 alone, as reported by National Cancer Institute.
Although the median survival rate from 2004 to 2010 among leukemia patients is 57.2%, it still doesn't change that fact that many are still dying with conventional treatments eventually failing them.
That may be about to change as a last-resort therapy has treated an overwhelming 90% of patients who no longer responded to conventional options.
In an article published in Reuters Health on Thursday, October 16, a team of doctors had introduced a new therapy that forces the healthy cells of patients with leukemia to go after and kill rogue cells that form the tumor.
The doctors employed such therapy on 5 adults and 25 children, and 27 of them responded well to it, a success rate of more than 90%. About 70% of those who showed a positive response didn't experience any recurrence of the disease while around 78% of patients who remained cancer free didn't have to receive any further treatment.
The results were more than enough to keep the doctors very happy. Speaking with Reuters, Dr. Stephan Grupp of the Children's Hospital in Philadelphia shared that they didn't really expect to get such impressive results especially since commonly doctors just bank on at most 5% remission rate.
For Dr. Noelle Frey who works for the University of Pennsylvania, she's happy to report that the treatment is showing huge promise as a treatment for both adults and children. She further added that considering the patients they administered it to were already losing their chance of finding a cure, the therapy surely puts hope into their lives. The Philadelphia study, for example, tried around 4 other methods with very little response from the same patients.
Although the doctors are still not sure whether the treatment really has some curative potential, they believe that it's still going to change the way hospitals treat the cancer.