Recipient: Associate Professor Tamas Revesz
Institute: Women's and Children's Hospital, Adelaide
Funding: $416,422 July 2018 to June 2022
Clinical trial to improve survival for children and adolescents with high-risk relapsed ALL.
While treatment results for standard-risk acute lymphoblastic leukaemia (ALL) have improved significantly, high-risk relapse still has a dismal prognosis. In Australia only 25 per cent of these patients survived in the most recent trial for them.
Behind the science: Associate Professor Tamas Revesz
To definitively demonstrate the curative potential of the latest therapeutic targets for children with high-risk ALL (HR-ALL), it is essential that local researchers collaborate with international groups to undertake randomised clinical trials using the most promising pharmaceutical agents.
Australian children’s cancer centres along with others in Japan and Europe have been offered the opportunity to participate in the randomised phase II trial known as IntReALL-HR (which is short for international study for treatment of childhood relapsed high risk ALL).
The main goal of this research is to improve the outcomes of children and adolescents diagnosed HR-ALL by determining if the addition of Bortezomib, a new therapeutic agent, to the standard chemotherapy treatment protocol will allow more patients to achieve clinical remission.
This trial will complement other national and international research programs to improve the treatment outcomes of children with HR-ALL, a cohort that desperately needs new treatment strategies. The study will also contribute to new knowledge regarding the genetic alterations in the cells of HR-ALL patients.