New Perspectives on Pediatric Acute Leukemia

Pediatric acute leukemia has represented one of the most rapidly evolving scenarios in the field of hematological malignancies over the last decades. Diagnosis, molecular characterization, treatment, disease monitoring and outcome have made enormous progress both for acute lymphoblastic (ALL) and myeloblastic leuekemia (AML). This progress is now resulting in long-term survival rates approaching 90% and 60% for ALL and AML respectively in developed countries. On the other side, the cure rate is still significantly lower for the middle income and developing countries. The improvement in supportive therapies and the implementation of large collaborative clinical trials based on risk-stratified treatment are largely desirable to minimize the gap of curability between these conditions.

This article collection will shed light on major issues, open for discussion, in the field of pediatric acute leukemia. In this series, we welcome original research articles and reviews which will cover a broad spectrum of topics and questions, such as:
• How to reduce the burden of toxicities and to manage important late effects of treatment?
• How to integrate the growing amount of knowledge coming from the advent of large scale genomic applications into routine diagnostic and clinical practice?
• What will be the most futurible scenario of treatment in the evolving era of targeted immunological approaches?

These emerging problems provide a challenging scenario for the pediatric hematologists taking care of children affected by acute leukemia and deserve the utmost attention of the scientific community.