Giving Compass' Take:

· New research from the New England Journal of Medicine may provide an explanation for why patients with acute myeloid leukemia often have a relapse after their stem cell transplants.

· How can the newly suggested therapeutic approaches help those patients who have relapsed?

· Read more about leukemia and cancer treatment methods.

Patients with AML, an aggressive cancer of the blood, often receive treatment in the form of stem cell transplantation, in which a compatible donor’s blood-forming cells are transplanted into a patient.

The donor’s immune cells then attack and kill the leukemia cells. But even if this treatment initially is successful, many patients experience a recurrence of the leukemia after transplantation that often proves fatal.

The study, which appears in the New England Journal of Medicine, involved the DNA sequencing of AML cells from 15 patients who relapsed after stem cell transplants and, as a comparison, 20 AML patients who relapsed after chemotherapy.

The researchers found that the mutations present in relapsed AML cells after transplantation were similar to those after chemotherapy.

Read the full article about treating acute myeloid leukemia by Julia Evangelou Strait at Futurity.