Pediatrician cured childhood leukemia
Dr. Donald Pinkel, a pediatrician who, starting in the early 1960s, developed an aggressive treatment for childhood leukemia that transformed the disease from a virtual death sentence to one that almost every patient survives, died Wednesday at his home in San Luis Obispo, Calif. He was 95.
His son John Pinkel confirmed the death.
Acute lymphocytic leukemia, a type of cancer that overwhelms the body with misshapen white blood cells, was once the No. 1 killer of children in the United States between the ages of 3 and 15, causing about 2,000 deaths a year. It had a 96 percent fatality rate — and doctors say that number might have been low, because the remaining 4 percent of cases were probably misdiagnoses.
When Donald Pinkel began his research as a pediatrician in Buffalo, in the 1950s, there were already several medications that could push the disease into remission.
But almost invariably the cancer would return. Doctors would then try a different drug, only to get the same results.
“At that time, with ALL, the idea was to try to prolong life in comfort — that was it,” Pinkel told Smithsonian magazine in 2016. “We called it ‘palliation.’ No one thought you were going to ‘cure’ anybody. That was almost a forbidden word.”
In 1961, shortly after moving to the newly founded St. Jude Children’s Hospital in Memphis, Tenn. — he was its CEO, medical director and first employee — he set on a radically different course. Instead of one drug or treatment at a time, he would use them all, pushing patients’ bodies to the limit in the hope that the cancer would die first.
“Dr. Pinkel and my father had the same unyielding hope and were equally audacious in their determination that childhood leukemia could be vanquished,” actress
Marlo Thomas, whose father, comedian and actor Danny Thomas, founded St. Jude, said in a statement.
Pinkel combined multiple chemotherapy drugs to drive the disease into remission. Then, when the patients were healthy enough, he and his team bombarded their skulls with radiation and injected drugs directly into their spinal columns, attacking places where Pinkel suspected the cancer was hiding during remission.
This would go on for months, even years. Children would lose their hair, their appetites. Some died. But by 1968, Pinkel’s regimen, which he called Total Therapy, was achieving remarkable results: Out of 31 patients in one study, 20 were in complete remission after 3 ½ years.
A decade later, after continued refinements to the protocol, the five-year survival rate was up to 80 percent. Today, still using Pinkel’s framework, it is 94 percent.
“He really is the man that cured leukemia,” said James Downing, current president of St. Jude.
Donald Paul Pinkel was born in Buffalo, N.Y., on Sept. 7, 1926.
His first marriage to Marita Donovan ended in divorce. Along with his son John, Pinkel is survived by his second wife, Cathryn Howarth; six daughters: Rebecca Amthor, Nancy Pinkel, Mary Pinkel, Noelle Greene, Sara Pinkel and Ruth Pinkel; two other sons: Thomas and Michael; his sister, Eileen Pinkel; 16 grandchildren; and five great-grandchildren. Another son, Christopher, died before him.
Pinkel won most of the major awards given in the medical field. In 2017, St. Jude named its new research tower after him.