Hi, my name is Tappan Khedia. I'm currently professor in the Department of Leukemia at MD Anderson Cancer Center. I'm here at the ASH meeting, delighted to be here to talk about some of our research that we're presenting, particularly for patients with acute myeloid leukemia. We have several abstracts and presentations. I want to talk a bit about a couple of abstracts in maintenance therapy. So as you know, maintenance in AML has recently been approved. That's the drug CC486, or oral azacytidine, which has shown a survival benefit among patients who receive intensive chemotherapy, achieve remission, and are not going on to stem cell transplant. What we found is that in that study, maintenance improved overall survival. So our question was, how can we improve on that? How would we build on HMA-based maintenance in patients with AML who are ineligible for transplant? So we have two studies. One is with azacytidine plus venetoclax as maintenance therapy among patients who are in remission. We saw excellent survival with the median duration of response not reached among patients who are AML who are in remission, who then receive maintenance therapy on the protocol. The combination was well tolerated, although it's a lower dose than what you would typically see with newly diagnosed AML. So we're using 50 milligrams per meter squared of the AZA for five days and venetoclax only for one week. And so very nice responses, particularly those who have IDH1, IDH2, NPM1 mutations and intermediate or favorable ELN risk AML. So a way to extend remissions after you do achieve remission if you're ineligible for stem cell transplant. Along the same lines, we have a second study. This using an oral decitabine, which is an oral hypomethylating agents given for just three days every month in combination with the various agents. And those agents are determined by your initial mutational profile. So if you were IDH1 mutated, you would get decitabine plus IvoCidnib, both oral drugs. If you're IDH2 mutated, you get oral decitabine and N-Cidinib. If you were flithrid mutated, you would get oral decitabine and Giltritinib. Otherwise you can either receive oral decitabine alone or oral decitabine and venetoclax in the maintenance setting. Early studies so far tolerated well with some dose reductions for cytopenias and the responses are ongoing yet with very few relapses. So I'm encouraged as we build on these studies to get the optimal regimen for maintenance among those patients who are not eligible to get allogeneic stem cell transplantation.
