The Paediatric Oncohaematology Unit announces its adhesion to the project on International Childhood Cancer Day
The Paediatric Oncohaematology Unit of the Hospital Universitario Son Espases has announced that it is joining the European clinical trial ALL Together with the aim of homogenising and offering the best treatment to children with acute lymphoblastic leukaemia (ALL).
The head of the Unit, Dr José Antonio Salinas, explains that today this type of cancer has a very good survival rate: ‘It is close to 90% in Spain’. However, he adds that this is a stagnant percentage and that the intention is to be able to increase it. This European-wide project has begun to be implemented in some health centres in Spain, and Son Espases, which has already signed the adhesion agreement, will include patients who arrive with this prognosis at the end of February in the study.
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Son Espases participates in the European ALL Together project to increase the survival rate of the most common childhood cancer
The Paediatric Oncohematology reference unit attends between twenty-five and thirty cases of childhood cancer (up to the age of eighteen) every year, and acute lymphoblastic leukaemia is the most frequent type, as it represents 25% of the diagnoses that are made; in other words, there are eight or nine cases a year in the Balearic Islands.
With this new protocol, each child’s disease can be treated in a more individualised way thanks to the comparison of their information with samples from a large European database that collects the variables of the disease in children from the fourteen European countries already participating in the clinical trial.
The Son Espases specialist reminds us that the aim is not only to cure more children but to cure them better and that this project aims to improve molecular and genetic studies of paediatric patients diagnosed with leukaemia to find the best treatment for each child.
The inclusion in the ALL Together clinical trial involves a great economic effort on the part of the Balearic Islands’ public funds, as well as close collaboration between national hospitals that treat paediatric cancer patients. Dr. Salinas points out that the challenge they face is to improve patient survival without suffering sequelae from the treatments because they know that many will reach adulthood.
However, the Unit also calls for the great advances made in developed countries to reach countries with fewer resources and for children to be treated with the best therapies regardless of where they were born because good global health is everyone’s responsibility.