Trials of a new anti-cancer drug have raised hopes that some leukaemia patients who previously had little prospect of survival may soon be able to control the disease with a daily pill, Australian researchers say.

Chronic lymphocytic leukaemia is the most common form of leukaemia in Australia, and each year around 1,000 Australians are diagnosed with the disease.

It usually becomes resistant to chemotherapy, and no effective treatment has been developed.

The new drug, ABT-199, has been the subject of trials involving dozens of patients for the past year and a half.

The drug was developed by the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute in Melbourne and trials have been run by the Royal Melbourne Hospital and the Peter MacCallum cancer hospital in Melbourne.

Haematologist Dr Con Tam says leukaemia is now undetectable in about 20 per cent of patients involved in the trial.

"For the patients I put on this trial, this is a life saver," he said.

"They come to me when their diseases have failed to respond to all other treatments, and under normal circumstances [with] these patients, all we can do is to watch the leukaemia grow and support them through, knowing that the leukaemia will kill them.

"This drug has completely changed that. These patients have gone from no treatment option to a highly effective treatment that restores their health and puts them back into normal life.

"Essentially we have never seen such a potent effect before, even with the strongest chemotherapy that we've had."

Dr Tam says one in five patients on the drug "will enter into a stage where the leukaemia is no longer detectable by conventional technology".

"We know that this is sometimes achievable with chemotherapy but we also know that with chemotherapy that invariably the leukaemia will come back even when it becomes undetectable," he said.

"Suffice to say that in this group of patients with almost every other drug that we've tried we usually see resistance emerge at about the three to four month mark and so far with this type, with this drug, we have not seen resistance emerge to a large extent."

Most new cases of the disease are in people over the age of 60, but Robert Oblak was diagnosed when he was 39.

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For the past two years he has been taking the experimental treatment.

"Instead of this downhill phase where each bout of chemo gets less effective and you get closer and closer to needing a bone marrow transplant, I can foresee myself just continuing with this drug really forever," he said.

But trials have not been a complete success. Two patients taking part in trials in the US died last year after being given a high dose of the drug.

Trials were suspended for several months, but Dr Tam says they are back on track and ready to enter a new phase.

"It is in what we call phase one development, which means that we're getting familiar with the drug and finding the right dose in humans and the right balance," he said.

"So in terms of getting this drug from a retail pharmacist it will be several years away, but for patients who are needy, who are willing to participate in a clinical trial, even now we're able to make this drug available to them."

The results of the trials were presented at a meeting of the American Society of Haematology in New Orleans overnight.