Neuroblastoma: New Hope for Kids

Reported May 28, 2010

PHILADELPHIA (Ivanhoe Newswire) -- Neuroblastoma is a childhood cancer of the nervous system that is often very aggressive. Patients who don't respond to surgery, chemotherapy and bone marrow transplant often face a death sentence. For the first time in more than a decade, researchers have developed a new therapy that could give these kids a fighting chance.

Elizabeth Buell-Fleming shows no sign of the battle her small body is waging. Last year, doctors removed a softball-sized tumor from her kidney. She endured weeks of aggressive chemotherapy.

Elizabeth's parents were hopeful the treatment for neuroblastoma -- cancer of the nervous system -- was working-until doctors told them a blood test showed the cancer had spread.

"Hearing that was like getting kicked in the gut," father Boyd Fleming told Ivanhoe. "He didn't say this, but I knew because I had done enough reading. Progressive disease after that is a death sentence. You don't survive that."

Dr. John Maris is one of several researchers studying a treatment that triggers the body's immune system to fight neuroblastoma cells. The immunotherapy combines an antibody known to target cancers and two cytokines, hormones that "rev up" the immune system.

"This really was a therapy designed to get any of these rare cancer cells that are hiding in the body -- quiescent, just hiding there -- to get those cells and eradicate them, so they could not contribute to a relapse," Dr. John Maris, chief of oncology at The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, told Ivanhoe.

Researchers studied 226 children nationwide with high-risk neuroblastoma. Patients who received the immunotherapy were 20 percent more likely to be cancer-free two years after treatment.

With standard treatment failing, doctors asked the National Cancer Institute to allow Elizabeth access to the experimental therapy. She's now in remission

"It felt like we came to the end of our options," mother Martha Buell said. "Then there were a few tricks they could pull out of a magic bag."

Not magic -- but science -- that has given Elizabeth another chance to be a kid.

Researchers say this treatment is the first one providing a substantial cure rate for neuroblastoma in more than 10 years.