Good afternoon. My name is Doctor David Andorsky, I'm a medical oncologist hematologist at the Sarah Cannon Research Institute, and I practice at the Rocky Mountain Cancer Center in Boulder, Colorado. I'm very happy today to talk to you about a paper that I'm a coauthor for here at Ash, 2024, of a trial of a medication called asciminib to treat chronic myeloid leukemia.
The trial is called ASC2ESCALATE. And it's looking at, the second line treatment of CML So again, patients that have had one prior therapy and stopped that therapy, either because they weren't tolerating it due to side effects or because it wasn't working well enough. So patients were then treated with asciminib, this was a single arm study.
So all patients started with the same dose of 80mg daily. The study had kind of an interesting design in that by the six month, time point, the first kind of point, we were evaluating how they were doing, if patients were not getting the degree response we wanted, the dose was increased to 200mg daily. And then there's a second escalation at 12 months to 200mg twice a day.
So this report really concerns that first endpoint at six months. What we saw was that about, 43% of patients were in what's called a major molecular response, which is, really where we want to get patients for control of this disease. Only two of 20 patients who were, eligible for dose escalation needed to escalate the dose.
So, again, most of the patients were on track, just at the normal 80mg dose, which is the currently FDA approved dose. And we saw that the drug seemed to be tolerable compared to previous reports. You know, some patients need to discontinue it or have dose reductions, but the vast majority, tolerated it well and didn't report too many side effects.
So, again, this is an important development. This is a very useful, medication for patients. And this study shows the utility of it, in the second line setting for the treatment of chronic myeloid leukemia. Thanks for your attention.
HealthTree • January 6, 2025