“Before the 1970s, fewer than 10% of children diagnosed with the disease survived five years after diagnosis. But since then, this outlook has improved dramatically.”
Childhood ALL went from 14% five-year survival in the 1960s to 94% in the 2010s. It came from tuning combinations and doses of existing drugs, not a miracle cure. More than half of US kids with leukemia are in clinical trials, and pooling them made the answers possible. Unglamorous coordinated work beat the breakthrough story.