Hi, my name is Dr. Jan-Philip Ebersdorf. I'm from Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, and I'm delighted to share some updates from this year's ASH annual meeting with all of you today. The project that I would like to discuss today was a multi-center retrospective analysis of patients with acute myeloid leukemia. Acute myeloid leukemia is the most common form of acute leukemia in adults, and it is currently treated with either intensive chemotherapy primarily in younger patients as well as in hypomethylating agents in combination with anadoclytes in older patients or patients who are unable to receive intensive chemotherapies because of other medical conditions. However, those two therapies have never been compared in a clinical trial, and we don't know if there's one if intensive chemotherapy is better than hypomethylating agents in combination with anadoclytes. And I think this is really a clinically relevant question, especially in older patients who are potentially eligible to receive intensive chemotherapy, but certainly have a higher risk than a younger patient. So what we did in this analysis is we picked two patient subgroups, one with NPM1 mutations. NPM1 mutations are most common mutations in acute myeloid leukemia, and looked at the outcomes of those patients were treated with intensive chemotherapy and comparing them to hypomethylating agents in combination with anadoclytes. And I have to state clearly that this is a retrospective analysis and not a randomized clinical trials. So take all of those results with a grain of salt. And what we could see is that when we adjusted the analysis for differences in disease characteristics and other factors like age or other mutations that predict prognosis in acute myeloid leukemia, we could see that those treatments had a similar outcome in survival. So I think this is a very intriguing finding because intensive chemotherapy requires about a one month stay in the hospital, while hypomethylating agents in combination with anadoclytes can be administered on an outpatient basis and have a different side effect profile. So I think this is thought provoking, but it can only be hypothesis generating and should provide the background and the incentive to re-conduct a clinical trial that randomizes patients and re-identifies what is the optimal treatment strategy for patients with AML, especially patients who are a little bit older and have a higher risk of complications with intensive chemotherapy.
HealthTree • December 21, 2023