How do I know if I'm responding to a treatment? What tests are used to determine a response? So the most typical test that we use to determine a response is a bone marrow biopsy. The bone marrow biopsy is like looking under the hood of your car to see what's going on in the engine. So we look at the bone marrow biopsy, we look if the part of the body that produces the blood cells looks normal or not. Now I always use the car analogy, but you know, you can't open the hood of your car every day. I mean you could, but you'd take up a lot of your time, you'd get dirty. So what we do when you're driving a car is use noises that your car makes to say, oh, you know, something might be wrong. So your complete blood count is the noises your car makes. So if you have anything wrong with your complete blood count, that gives us a hint that hey, maybe we need to take a look under the hood, do a bone marrow biopsy and see if everything's going okay. Great question, yes. We are increasingly using more and more advanced testing to help try and predict which treatments will work best for people. And I would say just five years ago, there were only two or three gene tests that we were routinely testing for. Now I would say it is common, if not necessary, to send an extended gene panel to look for specific mutations in the AML cells. We now have several drugs that can target AML with those specific mutations and there are other mutations that although we can't target them, they can help us predict which patients will respond longer or shorter to a treatment. And in the setting of those mutations, it may actually completely change which treatment we would recommend. And so I would say it is important to ensure that your doctor has done testing for some of the most common mutations in AML.
HealthTree • October 21, 2022