What other treatments were developed for chronic myeloid leukemia?
Meanwhile, other therapeutic advances were being made in the treatment of chronic myeloid leukemia. For one thing, alpha interferon (Roferon-A, Intron A) was developed and shown to have significant activity in this disease. With this treatment, a large number of patients had very good responses and some even lived much longer than would have been expected from the natural history of their disease. Interferon, therefore, became the standard therapy for patients who, either because they were too old or lacked an appropriate donor, could not be transplanted. For another advance, it was discovered that the cures after bone marrow transplantations for chronic myeloid leukemia were, for the most part, not due to the high doses of chemotherapy given to patients along with the transplantation. Instead, the cure was actually brought about by the transplantation of the components of the immune system itself. Put another way, when we do a bone marrow transplant, we are, in reality, transplanting
