Dr. Pikman on Matching Pediatric Patients With More Precise Leukemia Therapy

Yana Pikman, MD, a physician in the Cancer and Blood Disorders Center at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and instructor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School, discusses a trial attempting to match pediatric patients with more precise therapy for acute leukemia. Early findings were reported at the 2018 ASH Annual Meeting.

At the time of enrollment, pediatric patients had a sample of their leukemia sequenced and those data were reviewed by a panel of pediatric oncologists, therapeutic experts, and pathologists. Pikman says this process was to determine if researchers were able to identify any targetable mutations. If a targetable recommendation was made, the information was passed along to try to match a corresponding therapy.

This was a feasibility study, and Pikman says the next steps would include therapeutic studies testing the efficacy of the targeted agents. Researchers are discovering a number of novel genomic findings and identifying their significance to see whether therapy can be tailored towards them.