Chronic Myeloid Leukemia Treatment
As one of the world’s top cancer centers, MD Anderson brings together internationally renowned physicians with a specialized support team to customize your care. These highly experienced experts communicate and collaborate daily, ensuring you receive comprehensive leukemia treatment.
Many of these doctors focus not just on leukemia, but on specific types of leukemia, giving them a deep level of knowledge and experience to draw on when designing treatment plans.
The goal of leukemia treatment is to put the disease into remission and ultimately cure the patient. For leukemia, complete remission usually means that the patient’s bone marrow has no detectable microscopic evidence of the disease and his or her blood counts have returned to normal.
Even with normal blood counts, many leukemia patients require ongoing maintenance therapy to stay in remission. In some cases, patients in remission undergo a stem cell transplant to maintain remission.
Patients who remain in continued complete remission for an extended period of time are considered cured. This means they have an extremely low chance of recurrence. The exact amount of time it takes to be considered cured differs among leukemia types, but it is typically measured in years.
Chronic myeloid leukemia (CML) treatment plans
Treatment for CML can change depending on the phase of the disease: chronic, accelerated or blastic.
In the chronic phase, patients typically receive targeted therapy. Younger patients may also be candidates for a stem cell transplant. Some patients are also given chemotherapy to help lower elevated white blood cell counts.
In the accelerated and blastic phases, a stem cell transplant, targeted therapy and chemotherapy are primary treatments.
Chemotherapy
Chemotherapy drugs kill cancer cells, control their growth or relieve disease-related symptoms. Chemotherapy may involve a single drug or a combination of two or more drugs, depending on the type of cancer and how fast it is growing.
Learn more about chemotherapy.
Targeted therapy
Targeted therapy drugs are designed to stop or slow the growth or spread of cancer. This happens on a cellular level. Cancer cells need specific molecules (often in the form of proteins) to survive, multiply and spread. These molecules are usually made by the genes that cause cancer, as well as the cells themselves. Targeted therapies are designed to interfere with, or target, these molecules or the cancer-causing genes that create them.
For CML, the most common targeted therapy drugs are tyrosine kinase inhibitors. These drugs are designed to interfere with a protein in the tyrosine kinase family that encourages cancer cells to multiply rapidly.
Learn more about targeted therapy.
Stem cell transplantation
A stem cell transplant (also known as a bone marrow transplant) is a procedure that replaces cancerous bone marrow with new, healthy bone marrow stem cells. Stem cell transplants are usually given after an intense round of chemotherapy that kills the patient’s existing bone marrow cells and prepares the body for transplant. Patients usually must stay in the hospital for three to four weeks after the procedure.
A stem cell transplant may be needed for patients whose leukemia has returned or has not responded to standard treatments. It may also be recommended if the patient has a high-risk form of leukemia that would make a cure with standard treatments unlikely. This treatment can be physically challenging, so it is typically not given to patients who are older or otherwise unhealthy.
Learn more about stem cell transplants.
Clinical trials
As a top-ranked cancer center, MD Anderson offers multiple clinical trials for CML. Many of these cannot be found anywhere else. Trials explore new drug combinations and new drugs, including targeted therapies and immunotherapies.
