Can Midostaurin efficacy and research be done to make it more effective?

Can midostaurin cure AML?

Midostaurin can help in curing AML or a subset of patients. Now, how is that? So for patients with the FLT3-ITD mutation, they are considered more intermediate to high-risk patients. We know that perhaps chemotherapy by itself is insufficient to keep them in remission for a long time. And most of these patients would benefit from consolidation with a stem cell transplant down the line.

Midostaurin may help in getting these patients into a deep remission and then allowing them to proceed to transplant in a deep remission, which could ultimately cure a subset of these patients. So you could think of it as a bridge to cure, but it would be hard to say that by itself it would cure leukemia. There's a lot of research being done to improve the outcomes of patients with AML with the FLT3 mutation.

For example, it is already approved in the relapsed refractory setting, and many of these FLT3 inhibitors are being used as post-transplant maintenance. Recently, there was a positive study leading to a survival benefit with another FLT3 inhibitor called quizartinib compared to placebo. Things are improving by finding novel agents, which are even more effective than already approved agents, and hopefully with a side effect profile that is much more tolerable.