Projects we fund

Overview

Clinical trials help us find better ways of treating disease by giving doctors the opportunity to test new treatments. Thanks to a series of childhood leukaemia trials, we’ve made enormous progress in treating the disease. Most children with leukaemia in the UK will be given the opportunity to take part in a clinical trial, and as part of the trial called UKALL 2003, doctors pioneered a technique called minimal residual disease (MRD) testing. This helped to determine how well children responded to treatment, predicted how likely they were to relapse, and enabled doctors to tailor each child’s treatment. We’re now building on the success on UKALL 2003, and this exciting new trial is helping more young people by monitoring the effect of changes to their individual treatment regimes. The UKALL 2011 trial aims to improve treatment for children and young adults diagnosed with ALL or a type of non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL) called lymphoblastic lymphoma (LBL).

What difference will this project make?

With this trial, we’re building on the incredible success of earlier work – this enabled doctors to develop and refine treatment programmes for children with different types of leukaemia and risk factors. The latest trial will take the technique of minimal residual disease (MRD) testing and use it to monitor the effectiveness of a change to the chemotherapy regime for young people with the commonest form of childhood leukaemia, which is known as ALL. Doctors will use a drug called dexamethasone at a much earlier stage in treatment. Evidence suggests that this will reduce the number of children who relapse on treatment. It will also protect those children with lower risk leukaemia from the harmful side-effects associated with high doses of chemotherapy. Please note – this trial is no longer recruiting patients.