Cal’s Angels Advanced Leukemia Clinical and Research Program

Through strategic clinical partnerships and affiliations with research consortia, we offer a wide range of clinical trials and novel therapies for relapsed and refractory leukemia, several of which are not available elsewhere in the Chicagoland area. We partner with programs within Lurie Children’s, such as oncologists from the Hematological Malignancy Program, Stem Cell Transplant and CAR-T Cell Therapy specialists, Stanley Manne Children’s Research Institute investigators, and industry partners to provide clinical trials when conventional therapy options are no longer optimal for a cure.

We collaborate with pediatric clinical trial consortia such as:

• Children’s Oncology Group (COG)
• The COG Pediatric Early Phase – Clinical Trials Network (PEP-CTN)
• Therapeutic Advances in Childhood Leukemia (TACL)
• COG/Leukemia & Lymphoma Society Children’s Initiative (LLS PedAL)

The Cal’s Angels Advanced Leukemia Program runs a monthly multidisciplinary tumor board to discuss patient referrals. Our tumor board involves members from our hematopathology, cytogenetics and molecular diagnostics teams in addition to our program’s physicians. We discuss diagnostic information, prior treatment and responses, and generate a unified treatment recommendation with an emphasis on clinical trial options when available. Treatment recommendations from our tumor board are then discussed with the patient and family during an in person or telemedicine visit and/or the referring provider.

A multidisciplinary team of experts from the Hematological Malignancy Program, Stem Cell Transplantation, CAR T-Cell Therapy Program and Hematopathology will collaborate to review patient records and provide evidence-based recommendations to patients, their families, and their provider teams. Our team can provide consultative recommendations in-person or via telemedicine for residents of Illinois.

When needed, our program can add expertise from the Cancer Predisposition Program and/or Fertility Preservation and Hormone Restoration to your care team.

In addition to in-person consultations, our multi-disciplinary experts are available for telephone and telemedicine consultations for new patients, and those seeking a second opinion. For an appointment or second opinion, please contact us at 312.227.7842. or email us at Advanced_Leukemia_Program@luriechildrens.org.

The Advanced Leukemia Program collaborates with Loretta Li, MD, for basic and preclinical science research. The Loretta Li Laboratory is a translational leukemia research laboratory focused on identifying new therapeutic targets, developing preclinical models of disease, and validating the preclinical efficacy of novel targeted therapeutics in acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL). Her lab also studies how leukemia cells become resistant to targeted therapies. This work will provide insight as to which patients would most likely benefit from a targeted agent, facilitate the development of combination strategies to prevent or overcome resistance, and guide the rational design of next-generation small molecule inhibitors.