Silver Book Fact
“If you had been diagnosed with chronic myeloid leukemia (CML) in 1999, chances were that you would not be alive today. Just 3 out of 10 patients survived for even five years. In the meantime, you had two daunting treatment options: a high-risk bone marrow transplant or daily injections of interferon, the side effects of which have been compared to ‘having a bad case of the flu every day of your life.'”
Now “[y]ou can take a daily pill that has a good chance of driving your cancer into remission–normalizing your blood count with few, if any, side effects. The new medicine targets CML on a molecular level, so it affects only the enzyme responsible for the disease. The tremendous effectivenss and precision of the approach is heralded as the ‘wave of the future.'”
