By Mikkael A. Sekeres, M.D. May 3, 2018

What’s Meaningful to Our Patients

At the age of 28, my patient was already a war-weary veteran of leukemia.

When his cancer was diagnosed, we treated him with a multi-drug cocktail of chemotherapy over months, first with more intensive regimens that sidelined him from being able to work, and then with milder medicines.

His leukemia came raging back, though, so we treated him again, this time with one of the new, expensive immunotherapies that has been approved recently by the Food and Drug Administration. These are not curative, but in his case eliminated enough of the leukemia to enable him to receive a bone-marrow transplant, which did have the potential of curing him. cont