Introduction
Standard treatment for children, adolescents, and young adult patients (CAYA) patients with acute myeloid leukemia (AML) includes up to five cycles of chemotherapy containing cytarabine and anthracyclines. Improvements in supportive care, including oral and skin care regimens, empiric broad spectrum antibiotics and prophylactic antifungals have had a meaningful impact on the treatment related toxicity associated with AML therapy1, 2. Despite this, more than 40% of patients ultimately die of refractory or relapsed disease or treatment related toxicity3. Patients with high-risk AML are candidates for allogeneic hematopoietic cell transplantation (allo-HCT) which similarly carries regimen related toxicities in addition to risk for graft-versus-host disease (GvHD). Advancements in supportive care have also led to improvement in survival for patients with myeloid malignancies undergoing allo-HCT4.
The choice of conditioning regimen plays a major role in a patient’s likelihood of achieving a graft-versus-host-free-relapse-free survival (GRFS), however there is no consensus on the optimal conditioning regimen. Historically, the most common preparative regimen used for patients with AML was total body irradiation (TBI) with cyclophosphamide (CY) which was later largely replaced by busulfan (BU) and CY5. BU-CY was associated with comparable disease control without the long-term secondary effects of irradiation6. BU-fludarabine (FLU) gained significant traction to reduce the toxicity of high dose CY, however it led to inferior progression-free-survival (PFS), when compared to BU-CY in adults7. To improve the efficacy of pre-transplant conditioning while keeping non-relapse mortality (NRM) low, three drug regimens were introduced with an additional alkylator. These included thiotepa (TT)-BU-FLU, BU-CY-melphalan (MEL) or BU-FLU-MEL. In an adult study, TT-BU-FLU demonstrated superior survival as compared to BU-FLU due to a reduced risk of relapse, with comparable NRM8. BU-FLU-Mel was also associated with better overall (OS) in adult patients without increase in non- NRM compared to FLU-BU due to decreased relapse9. There is limited pediatric data on the comparison of three drug regimens to the more conventional BU-CY or TBI-CY. A multi-center study by the European Group for Blood and Marrow Transplantation (EBMT) reported on AML patients between ages 2-18 years. Patients receiving BU-CY-MEL showed a lower incidence of relapse, higher OS and PFS with a comparable NRM when compared to those conditioned with BU-CY or TBI-CY10. We previously demonstrated that BU-FLU-MEL conditioning was safe and effective in a limited series of six pediatric patients with high-risk myeloid malignancies11. Herein, we expand our experience utilizing this regimen effectively in CAYA with myeloid malignancies undergoing matched or alternative donor allo-HCT.