Kane Ransom’s Christmas wish is simple this year — he wants to be cancer-free so his family can go on holidays.
The seven-year-old, who is 40 weeks into 118 weeks of chemotherapy for his second bout of acute lymphoblastic leukaemia (ALL), has reason to be hopeful.
A major breakthrough by researchers in Sydney has opened up the possibility for new and better treatments for ALL, the most common childhood cancer.
Each year, about 150 Australian children are diagnosed with the aggressive form of blood cancer, and about 15 per cent have a subtype less responsive to treatment and more likely to relapse.
But new research published by the Children’s Cancer Institute has discovered why one of the most successful classes of drugs used to treat ALL, glucocorticoids, fails to work on those sufferers.
Led by Professor Richard Lock and Dr Duohui Jing, the researchers found a mechanism of glucocorticoid resistance in ALL that opens up the potential of a 100 per cent cure rate.
“It means that we’ve discovered a possible new way that the disease can become resistant to treatment and hopefully in the future that will lead to new ways to overcome that resistance,” Prof Lock said.
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By looking at the blood profiles of patients with both the glucocorticoid-sensitive and resistant forms of ALL, the researchers found an abnormal folding of DNA structure in cells that hides the glucocorticoids’ targets on cancer cells.
“It’s a very clever way that the cancer has developed to avoid being killed,” he said.
Using a drug that exposed the hidden DNA regions, when combined with glucocorticoids in animal models representing resistant patents, they found a significant improvement in response.
While ALL is one of the major success stories in cancer chemotherapy — with a survival rate of about 90 per cent today compared to zero in the 1950s and 60s — for the small proportion of high risk and resistant case, it’s a different story.
Kane, who was first diagnosed with ALL in May 2014 when he was three, spent 18 months cancer free after the first round of treatments until he relapsed on November 22 last year.
Hospitalised for 34 days straight, on Christmas Day, his bone density was so low, his family couldn’t even hug him.
“This year he’s just stoked to be home,” said Mrs Ransom, who said the research findings were an extra cause for optimism.
“It gives us hope, and I suppose that’s what our oncologist always says to us, that even though Kane’s cancer has come back, we’ve still got three or four more drugs up our sleeve that we could use and a bone marrow still on the table.
“It helps keep my husband and me in that positive mindset that Kane will get better, it’s just when.”