How Childhood Cancer Treatment Has Changed

Clip: 9/2/2026 | 2m 2sVideo has Closed Captions

How childhood cancer survival rates have improved through advances in treatment.

Dr. Kay Saving explains how childhood cancer survival rates have increased from roughly 60 to 65 percent decades ago to approximately 85 to 90 percent today. She discusses advances including combination chemotherapy, bone marrow transplants, targeted drugs, immunotherapy and gene therapy, along with efforts to reduce treatment’s long-term effects.

9/2/2026

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- How have things changed over the 40 years?

And I assume they're all for the better, or most of it.

- Yes.

Well, lots of changes.

So, for instance, back in the '60s, '70s, the survival overall for kids with cancer was about 60, 65%.

Now it's about 85, 90%.

We still have trouble treating some cancers.

Not every child diagnosed survives, but most of them do, which is a great thing.

And that's because lots of things have changed.

At the beginning, when we first had kids diagnosed with cancer, we sort of said, "We've got to..." And the cure rate was very low.

"...we've got to do things about that.

We've got to really maximize what we're doing, use new drugs, do things for children."

We started with drugs that were used in adults and then use those in children.

Things that have really helped are like combination chemotherapy.

So we rarely treat with just one drug, usually multiple drugs, both in adults and children to treat that.

Other things have come about, such as bone marrow transplant, which has been very helpful for children as well as adults, but children and teens with cancer.

As we got better at the cure rate, then we said, "Let's work on the best, least therapy because there are side effects to all the things that you do for treatment for cancer."

And so we wanted to kind of mold it so that we didn't have a lot of those late effects.

Now we still have some, and that's an area of research now, an area where people work in that area to help those kids do better with any late effects.

But that has really helped us lessen those late effects.

Now we have more individualized kind of therapy for certain cancers.

If there's a specific genetic mutation, then we can target that with different kinds of drugs for that.

There's immune therapy, so we can help use the patient's own immune system to fight off certain cancer cells, things like that.

And now, one of the newer things, gene therapy.

So all of those things have really helped us be able to have a better survival rate for kids with cancer, as well as try and lessen the late effects.