Hi everybody. Thanks so much. My name is Aaron Goldberg and a leukemia physician at Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City. It's a pleasure to talk with you today about acute myeloid leukemia. It's an updates from our European Hematology Association annual meeting.
So, in acute myeloid leukemia, this is a it's a serious blood cancer. But outcomes have been getting better and better. And in particular, I want to talk about the use of a drug called venetoclax, which has really improved outcomes in our adults with acute myeloid leukemia who are older. The median age is about 68 years old. And, also for patients who are not fit, who might be younger but not fit to receive intensive chemotherapy.
So we've known, for a while from clinical trial data that this can provide a, a very good treatment option for our patients. About two thirds of the patients can achieve remissions, with this, with this, combination. But we want to look at actually is how does this combination work now in the real world? Outside of the clinical trial setting.
And so we wanted to see, you know, number one, how do you manage the drug? You know, what do we do with patients? How do we get them into remission? And then what are the different medications that we use to keep them in remission? And how do we a dose the medication and and what are the effects of the different medications that we use have on that dosing.
And then we also wanted to look at what's the impact on what we call health care resource utilization. You know, historically acute myeloid leukemia has been a disease that was treated largely, you know, with intensive chemotherapy. And that's mostly in the inpatient hospital setting.
And I think one of the advantages of this newer regimen is that we're now able to give this highly effective treatment that's much more outside the hospital and much more in the clinic.
So for this first, you know, real world evidence initiative, we partnered with a bunch of centers that are 17 sites, around the world to just collect our data to see how our patients doing with acute myeloid leukemia. And again, what we saw, you know, first is that it's similar to the clinical trial data.
About two thirds of our patients are able to achieve, these remissions. And then we focus, you know, really closely, on those patients receive remissions. And we asked some questions about, you know, how long these remissions last. What are the different medicines that patients are on? Does it affect the dosing different in a class. Does it matter? If we take breaks for example.
And so one of the things that we found is that it is okay and actually even important to take a short break after each treatment cycle to allow the blood cell counts to recover.
So that's, I think, also from a patient perspective, you know, we're not really giving the venetoclax drug as an oral pill every day. We're giving it maybe initially for 28 days in a row. And then with later rounds or cycles of treatment, we shorten it to 21 or even 14 days of treatment and allow some time for account recovery.
And the other agent is this is exciting given IV or decided being also given IV for the first 5 or 7 days. And what we found is that it's okay to take those breaks and actually we should take those breaks, but we also don't want to wait too long.
We did find that if we waited for more than 15 days between cycles, there was a trend towards patients maybe having a shorter period of time where their disease was under control and remission.
So I do think that was one of the take homes, was that we should take those breaks to allow blood count recovery, but not necessarily wait, forever for blood count recovery.
In terms of other medicines, we found that it was okay to give medicines like growth factors in the setting of remission. They didn't seem to have any impact upon how patients did with that. So that was a helpful lesson to learn.
Also, antifungals. So antifungal use is very important to try to reduce the risk of infections in our patients. And we found that that seemed to be okay. There was no impact on the duration of how long patients were in remission.
Thank you so much.
HealthTree • June 30, 2025