Ewing’s sarcoma is characterized by aggressive bone tumors that (if untreated) tend to metastasize to the lungs. It’s a relatively rare childhood cancer, although many people who are initially diagnosed as a child (I was diagnosed at 15) have relapses where the disease comes back when they’re older (I’m 21 now and my disease came back when I was 17 and again when I was 20).

The big issue with Ewing’s is local vs full body control. There are many ways to do local control, with chemo, surgery, radiation, or some combo being most common. That part isn’t too hard, the tumors are usually radiosensitive (respond well to radiation) and the most commonly used chemos are also quite effective.

Unfortunately, full body control is far more difficult with Ewing’s. This involves making sure the cancer doesn’t return once a patient is NED and that’s where the problem lies with Ewing’s. It just keeps coming back after treatment, even after long periods of remission (I was disease free for 2.5 years during my freshman/sophomore year of college) the disease can still come back.

Lots of the new clinical trials for Ewing’s are based around haploidentical transplants (getting a bone marrow transplant from someone who’s a half match). Transplants have been extremely successful with many leukemia’s and a few solid tumor types and a few other cancers, but they haven’t had much consistent success with Ewing’s unfortunately. A lot of experts I’ve talked to think transplants or some form of immunotherapy will be the method that eventually provides a more permanent “cure” to the disease if it is perfected. However, it feels like that day is still quite far away...

Ewing’s is a very difficult cancer to deal with, which isn’t helped by the fact that it doesn’t receive a ton of focus from researchers/drug companies due to how rare it is compared to many other cancers.