How is CML treated?
CML is either treated with drug therapy or with a bone marrow transplant (BMT) BMT BMT is also known as a stem cell transplant (SCT). This type of therapy involves 2 steps. First, a very high dose of a drug is given to the patient to kill most of the cells in the bone marrow (cancer cells and healthy cells). The second step is to replace all of the stem cells that were destroyed with only healthy cells. These replacement cells are usually taken from someone else (this is known as an allogeneic transplant), and are occasionally taken from the patient (this is known as an autologous transplant). Very few patients are actually candidates for BMT. Glivec Glivec is an oral therapy that targets the specific cause of CML. Unlike prior drug therapies used in the treatment of CML, Glivec has been shown to extend survival of patients in all phases of CML in clinical trials1-3.
