What drugs can be given during induction therapy?

What drugs can be given during induction therapy? So the drugs that can be given during induction therapy are nowadays there are a number of options. So, and a lot of it depends really on how well somebody is going into induction. So if you want to think about it in very broad strokes, we give either intensive or non-intensive therapies. And this is generally based on how well somebody is doing kind of in the immediate weeks, months, even years leading up to their diagnosis because a lot of people can have other health problems coming into it. They can have problems with their heart, with their kidneys, they can, you know, if they're an older adult they can just kind of be a little bit more frail and that will kind of play into what we think about in terms of giving patients therapy. We want to make sure that we're doing our best to get rid of the leukemia but we also want to, you know, give patients therapies that won't be too toxic for them and give them infections or other life-threatening things because of the therapy and not because of the disease. So when we think about it, kind of the bread and butter longest standing thing is something called 7 plus 3 which is a combination of two different drugs that work with different mechanisms. One of them is called Donor Rubison, the other one is called Cytarabine. One's given for three days and the other for seven days, hence that name 7 plus 3. They're all infusional drugs, meaning they're given through an IV and patients will get them for those beginning days and then after that they'll kind of be in the hospital for monitoring usually for several weeks afterwards and that time can depend on the patient and kind of how they're doing. Nowadays there's a bunch of other options that are coming on board. There's things that we can give in addition to that 7 plus 3. Those are based a lot on the particular mutations or other markers that we'll see in the blood for patients' leukemias. There can be kind of targeted drugs that target a specific mutation. There's one that's called FLT3 that has an approved pill that people will take kind of in addition to that 7 plus 3. There's also people who have a particular type of or a particular marker on their leukemia cells and have a particular milieu or flavor of mutations that we will add another drug on top of the 7 plus 3 that's given through the IV and that's got a very long name that's abbreviated as GEO. So, it's something separate from that 7 plus 3. There are other formulations of it that we can use to more specifically target the bone marrow for people whose leukemia might arise from a different blood cancer beforehand or who have had cancers beforehand that have required treatment and that the leukemia might be related to that treatment they've had in the past. And beyond that, those are kind of some of the intensive therapies. There's also less intensive therapies that are combinations of pills and injections that people can get. Nowadays, the most common version of this is called azacitidine and vanataclax. These are kind of two-minute medications. The first one I mentioned is the one through the IV and the second one is a pill. People will take the infusion kind of for the first 7 or 10 days and then they will take the pill actually on a continuous basis. In addition, there's actually just like single pills people can take for very specific mutations and one of those is called anacitinib. So there's a wide variety of drugs that we're using now and I think the main points to take home are that there's kind of a big differentiation between the intensity of therapy that doctors and patients need to decide on together and kind of what the goals of the therapy are, kind of what the mutations are, what the chances are of it working, what the chances are of things causing problems.