Credit: St Jude Children’s Research Hospital Donald Pinkel, who has died at the age of 95, was at the forefront of the revolution that turned childhood leukaemia from an invariably fatal disease in the 1950s to one that can be cured in well over 90% of cases. Antifolate drugs such as methotrexate were used to treat children with leukaemia, and other antimetabolite drugs were discovered, including corticosteroids, but responses to single drugs were short lived and the leukaemia came back. The breakthrough came from St Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee, US, where Pinkel took the bold step of giving combinations of active drugs. He called this “total therapy” and in a series of relatively short studies with only 50-100 children with leukaemia, the survival rates improved from zero to 50%. Further progress has been made by the development of cooperative groups which can enter large numbers of children into …

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唐纳德平克尔：创新儿童白血病的治疗方法

图片来源：St Jude Children's Research Hospital Donald Pinkel，享年 95 岁，他站在革命的最前沿，将儿童白血病从 1950 年代的致命疾病转变为可在 90% 以上的人中治愈的疾病案例。甲氨蝶呤等抗叶酸药物曾用于治疗儿童白血病，还发现了其他抗代谢药物，包括皮质类固醇，但对单一药物的反应是短暂的，白血病又卷土重来。这一突破来自美国田纳西州孟菲斯市的圣裘德儿童研究医院，Pinkel 在该医院采取了提供活性药物组合的大胆举措。他将此称为“全面治疗”，在一系列相对较短的研究中，只有 50-100 名白血病儿童，存活率从零提高到 50%。