If You Build It, Patients with Rare Cancers Will Come: A Successful Clinical Trial in Relapsed and Refractory JMML

Summary: Juvenile myelomonocytic leukemia (JMML) is a rare pediatric hematologic malignancy with a high relapse rate and a poor prognosis hallmarked by RAS pathway mutations. Stieglitz and colleagues conducted a phase II clinical trial using the MEK inhibitor trametinib to treat patients with relapsed and refractory juvenile myelomonocytic leukemia and observed an objective response rate of 50% and an overall survival of 80% after 4 years. See related article by Stieglitz et al., p. 1590 (4) .