Today, the most common childhood cancer is cured in about 80 percent of patients; only forty years ago, this number was closer to five percent. In efforts to further increase the survival rate, researchers from St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, the University of Tennessee, and the University of Chicago studied how an individual’s genetics might play a role in the effectiveness of chemotherapy drugs. Their findings will be published in the June 15, 2005, issue of Blood, the official journal of the American Society of Hematology.
