|  | | | Leukaemia Research funds clinical trials so that new drugs or treatments developed in the laboratory can be tested on patients. Clinical trials are a vital part of our commitment to improving diagnosis and treatment for all patients with blood cancer.
Clinical trials are studies in patients that aim to assess the safety and efficacy of a new treatment, find the optimal dose and duration of the treatment and compare the effectiveness of the new drug with standard treatment. Not all these aims can be achieved in just one clinical trial: a distinction is made between 'early phase' (phase I and II) and 'late phase' (phase III) trials.
 | A phase I trial is the earliest clinical study where the main concern is to determine the safety of a new treatment. |
| In a phase II trial, the aim is to find out whether a treatment or new drug is effective, assess side-effects and their management and determine the optimum dose of the new treatment. |
| In phase III trials, new drugs or treatments which have shown minor or no side-effects in phase I and were effective in phase II trials are evaluated and compared with the best currently available treatment. |
Leukaemia Research mainly supports early phase I/II trials and occasionally small phase III clinical trials.
 | Phase I trial of immunotherapy treatment for patients with AML |
A new clinical trial at the Royal Free Hospital in London is evaluating a treatment that uses a special type of immune cell to fight acute myeloid leukaemia (AML).
Natural Killer (NK) cells are a type of white blood cell whose job is to kill cancer cells and virus-infected cells. In the new trial, which is led by Dr Mark Lowdell and Dr Panos Kottaridis, patients will be given special NK cells isolated from healthy relatives and which have been specifically activated to recognise the tumour cells. The hope is that these 'tumour-activated' NK cells (taNKs) will seek out and kill cancer cells remaining after chemotherapy treatment.
The phase I trial will be carried out on elderly patients who have suffered a relapse and on younger patients who are not eligible for a conventional stem cell transplant. The aim of the trial is to test the safety of the new treatment, to determine the persistence of the activated donor cells and to document disease response.
Leukaemia Research produces a booklet for more detailed information on clinical trials. You can view this booklet online or download it as a pdf below.
To find out more about clinical trials, please check the following websites:
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