Karla Lopez was understandably distraught when she was diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia in 2023. But at the age of 23, she was both young and optimistic that her initial stay at UAB Hospital would not last for more than a week or so before she could begin treatment.

Two months, five blood infusions, and a problematic blood clot later, Lopez finally was released from the hospital, with an uncertain path of recovery still ahead.

Lopez was unable to work, and she had to rely on her mother, brother, and other family members to take care of her two young children. She dreaded the prospect of embarking on rounds of heavy chemotherapy treatment and enduring the accompanying side effects, with the possibility of a needing a bone marrow transplant if the chemo didn’t work.

“It was just one thing after another,” Lopez says. “I felt my world was crashing down on me.”

"I’m starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel. I’m feeling great. I'm glad I did the trial, not just for me but for other people."

Karla Lopez

Then, Lopez was offered an intriguing option by UAB leukemia specialist Sravanti Rangaraju, M.D.; Lopez could enroll in a clinical trial and possibly receive a chemo-free treatment through the immunotherapy blinatumomab, which directs a patient’s own T cells to locate and destroy the cancer cells.

cancer cells.

The drug is already FDA-approved for use with patients who undergo the initial chemo treatments and then relapse, so the trial was designed to study whether the drug could be effective as a standard-of-care treatment in place of chemotherapy.

“For a young woman, chemotherapy can have an effect on your fertility and your appearance,” Rangaraju says. “Also, with this kind of leukemia, once people go into remission after chemotherapy, the leukemia still has a 90 percent chance of coming back. Then, the patients might have to receive a bone marrow transplant. But if you have an excellent response with this immunotherapy treatment, you can avoid the side effects that come with chemotherapy and avoid a bone marrow transplant.”

Lopez agreed to become one of the 480 patients worldwide to participate in the trial, and even though she had to come off the trial because of some minor complications before completing the entire two-year-long series of treatments, she had received enough positive benefits that she was able to continue successful treatment with another drug.

Lopez says she received one slight setback late in 2024 when a small amount of cancer was discovered in her spine. But overall, her treatments worked as designed, and she currently is in remission.

“I’m starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel. I’m feeling great,” Lopez says. “I’m glad I did the trial, not just for me but for other people. I don’t wish this on anyone, but the next person who is in my shoes, I want to improve the medicine for them.”

And that, Rangaraju says, is precisely the purpose of conducting these types of clinical trials.

“This study is now complete, and the patients are being followed to see how they do,” Rangaraju says. “We hope to have the results in the next few years. It might change the way we treat this cancer for future generations, and immunotherapy will be the standard instead of chemotherapy. It’s very generous of people like her to participate in these studies because it advances science tremendously.”