What are the current treatment options available for patients with AML?

What are the current treatment options available for patients with AML? So how we treat AML really depends on the characteristics of the disease and the features of the patient that we meet. A lot of our therapy is chemotherapy and much of it is very intense or high dose therapy. However, the median age of diagnosis for patients with AML is usually over 65. So you could appreciate how some of our older patients or higher in age patients might have difficulty with some of the higher dose chemotherapy. So we also have some chemotherapies which are less intense. But how we approach a patient depends on many different things. Ultimately, chemotherapy is the way that we treat acute myeloid leukemia. So for patients with AML, we usually divide them into two major groups. One is patients that would get what we call intensive chemotherapy and another option is not intensive chemotherapy. Sometimes we call them not medically fit for intensive chemotherapy. So I'll start by talking about intensive chemotherapy. So this typically always involves a hospitalization that usually is a prolonged hospitalization, three to four weeks. And patients get what we call induction chemotherapy. So the idea is to induce remission. The typical regimens that are used for this is something called 7 and 3. It's a term that AML patients get to know a lot. But basically the name comes from two drugs that are used. One is given for seven days and one is given for three days. And that's where 7 and 3 comes from. So one is an anthracycline. There are a few options. But basically the drug is a type of anthracycline. And then the other drug is citarabin. And so citarabin is given as a continuous infusion for seven days. So patients are hooked up to an IV and they're just getting a drug infused all the time. The other drug is given for a short infusion for three days. And this is what we call induction chemotherapy. It's called intensive chemotherapy for a reason. Basically the goal of this therapy is to completely wipe out the bone marrow with the goal of wiping out the bad leukemia cells. As a result, we also get rid of the good cells. So the result of this is that patients become very cytopenic, meaning their blood counts are very, very low.