St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital has achieved another milestone in its fight against childhood cancer — a 5-year-survival rate of over 90 percent for acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL), the most common form of childhood cancer.
This marks another historic advance in St. Jude’s success story in fighting ALL and childhood cancer. When St. Jude opened in 1962, ALL was a death sentence for children — with a survival rate of less than 4 percent.
“St. Jude remains the world leader in the research and treatment of pediatric cancer,” said William E. Evans, St. Jude’s Chief Executive Officer. “We are proud of our long history in saving lives and giving hope to children and families confronting this deadly killer. But of course, we are still at risk of losing 1 in 10 children to ALL and other cancers remain an even greater threat to thousands of children. Even with this enormous progress, cancer kills more U.S. children between 1 and 15 years of age than any other disease. So, we still have much work to do.”
The new survival rate measures how many cancer patients are still living five years after they were first diagnosed with cancer. Cancer is considered cured when a patient has been cancer free or has suffered no side effects for 10 years. A St. Jude paper published in January in the New England Journal of Medicine projected that St. Jude would achieve a 90 percent cure rate for ALL in the foreseeable future.
“Without the support of millions of donors and volunteers over many years, we could not have spearheaded this progress,” Evans said. “All of us at St. Jude are grateful for their generosity. Most importantly, the children and families battling childhood cancer are grateful.”
