Inside Pediatrics Summer 2022

Asher was five years old at the time of his diagnosis with APL. This diagnosis leads to a lot of absences from school for patients like Asher, who according to Daniel, missed about half of kindergarten while being treated.

Below , doctors use a catheter to insert the valve into a vein in the patient’s right leg. From there, doctors are able to place it in the patient’s heart. With an open-heart surgery, Kelley could have been in the hospital for more than a week. After the Harmony valve procedure, she left the next day.

“You can say, ‘OK it’s bad, no matter which (type of leukemia) we had.’ But I’m going to be grateful that it’s this and not something else,” Daniel said. “Because with this, it’s much more manageable.”

Asher was one of 154 pediatric APL patients who participated in Kutny’s study, which was coordinated by the National Cancer Institute. Between 2015 and 2019, More than 80 institutions across the Children’s Oncology Group (COG) enrolled patients in the study. It found that the treatment of arsenic trioxide and ATRA without cytotoxic chemotherapy were just as effective as the traditional chemotherapy treatment while being far less challenging to the patient. It’s now the new standard of care for these patients. The study was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association–Oncology in November.

“We’re excited as a COG investigator to be in an era where we can offer patients a far more effective and less toxic approach to treating cancer,” Kutny said.

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