New cancer treatment shows high success rate

LOS ANGELES (KABC) -- Ten-year-old Kaiden Schroeder is such a huge fun of the Kansas State football team that the players let him suit up for a play.

Kaiden knows quite a lot about sports, but he also knows more than others about cancer. He was diagnosed with Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia in May 2009, when he was only four years old.

When chemotherapy did not work, he received a bone marrow transplant. His younger sister Ashlyn was his donor.

"After transplant, he had several months off because the transplant was supposed to be the cure that he needed," Jenny Schroeder, his mother, said.

But Kaiden's cancer returned.

Dr. Shannon Maude, a pediatric oncologist at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, is studying a new transplant in patients with recurrent ALL using a patient's own T-cells, a type of white blood cell.

"We actually will take T-cells and make them recognize leukemia as being something foreign that it needs to kill," she said.

Researchers extract blood with the patient's T-cells and reprogram them. Then the new T-cells are infused, which binds the patient's cancer cells and wipes out the cancer.

Maude said 92 percent of patients are in remission within a month of therapy.

Kaiden went through this treatment and it's working to keep him cancer-free.