Novel Therapeutic Strategies in Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia

Chemotherapy cures only a minority of adult patients with acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL). In addition, relapsed ALL has a poor outcome with 5-year survival as low as 7 %. Hence, there is a need to develop effective therapies to treat relapsed disease and to combine these agents with chemotherapy to improve outcomes in newly diagnosed patients. ALL cells express several antigens amenable to target therapies including CD19, CD20, CD22, and CD52. Over the last decade, there has been a surge in the development of immune therapies which target these receptors and that have induced robust responses. In this manuscript, we review these novel immune agents in the treatment of B-ALL. As these new therapies mature, the challenge going forward will be to find safe and effective combinations of these agents with chemotherapy and to determine their place in the current treatment schema.