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My name is Ching-Hon Pui.
I'm a pediatric oncologist at
Saint Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee, USA.
This talk is about Genetic Abnormalities in
Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia, focusing mainly on childhood cases.
For the rest of the talk,
I will mention its abbreviation, ALL.
ALL as shown in a bone marrow smear on
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the left, and as a white column of sediment on the right is the most common childhood cancer,
representing one fourth of all cancers in children.
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The treatment of children with ALL is one of
the greatest success stories of modern medicine.
The five-year survival rate has increased from
20 percent in the early 1960s to over 90 percent today.
The main reason for this remarkable achievement included
an effective treatment administered in controlled clinical trials,
precise diagnosis and risk classification,
and improved support care.
Because of the ease to obtain leukemia samples,
laboratory studies of child ALL have reviewed many of
the principles underlying current knowledge of cancer cell biology,
further boosting the treatment results.
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With standard chromosomal and FISH analyses,
specific genetic abnormalities can be found in 75-80 percent of child ALL cases.
With a recent event of genome-wide analysis,
virtually all cases can now be classified based on
the primary genetic abnormalities, as shown in this slide.
