Cancer is one of the scariest words anyone can hear, especially parents awaiting news of their child's condition. When Astrid King began having fevers and lethargy, her parents took her to UCSF Benioff Children's Hospital Oakland, where a series of blood tests revealed a frightening diagnosis: She had acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL). Cancer was about to change the lives of Astrid, just 5 years old, and her family.
"When you are sitting in a hospital with your child in a gown and you hear the word leukemia, your heart stops," said Astrid's father, Richard King. "I remember feeling this existential dread, wanting to protect my daughter but knowing the challenges she now faced."
New treatment minimizes chemotherapy
ALL is traditionally treated using large doses of chemotherapy and exposing the entire body to radiation in a process called conditioning, followed by a bone marrow – or stem cell – transplant. Although still used by most pediatric cancer centers in the country, the chemo and radiation raise kids' risk of long-term side effects, including other cancers and infertility.
Astrid, however, received a new precision treatment developed by two UCSF specialists, Dr. Christopher Dvorak, an expert in pediatric blood cancers and chief of the UCSF Department of Pediatrics' Division of Allergy, Immunology and Bone Marrow Transplantation, and pharmacist Janel Long-Boyle, who studies cancer therapies.
