Chronic Leukemia

People with advanced chronic cancers are now living for many years as a result of new targeted anti-cancer treatments. Many of these treatments are quite new and people may take them for months, even years, as long as the treatments are helping. The purpose of this study is to help understand how to best support people receiving these treatments.

The study will be conducted retrospectively and prospectively, using bone marrow (BM) or peripheral blood (PB) samples or biopsies of lymph nodes or tissues with metastatic involvement taken from previously stored samples here at the University Hospital of Parma or taken from patients that need to underwent diagnostic evaluation for a suspect or a defined diagnosis of hematological malignancies collected at the University Hospital of Parma.

This is a biological study based on a collaborative effort involving several Italian haematology centres (including the coordinating centre). The study will be conducted retrospectively and prospectively using bone marrow (BM) or peripheral blood (PB) samples, lymph node or tissue biopsies with metastatic involvement, and other biological fluids, such as cerebrospinal fluid and pathological pleural effusion.

This is a multicenter, experimental preclinical study conducted on primary samples from patients diagnosed with hematological or solid neoplasms defined as high risk. The study will be prospective, based on the consecutive enrollment of eligible patients at each participating institution.

This study is being done to determine how long it takes for the engraftment (recovery of blood cell counts) of umbilical cord stem cells and also how often engraftment of umbilical cord stem cells transplanted from an unrelated donor fails. Another purpose will be to document the rate of disease-free survival and the rate of relapse (a return of your disease or syndrome) as well as the incidence and severity of graft versus host disease (GvHD) following cord blood stem cell transplantation. GvHD is a complication of stem cell transplants in which white blood cells from the transplanted tissue (graft) attack the transplant recipient's body (host).