Evaluating IWG Response Criteria for MDS Patients | Jan Bewersdorf, MD | ASH 2023

My name is Jan-Philip Eerstorf. I'm a leukemia fellow at Memorial Sloan Keller and Cancer Center in New York, and I greatly appreciate the opportunity to talk to all of you today. I'm delighted to share some updates on a recent abstract that we presented this year's IWG-ASH Annual Meeting, which evaluates the new International Working Group, or IWG, response criteria in patients with myelodysplastic syndrome, or MDS. So MDS is a disease that primarily affects older adults. The median age of diagnosis in the mid-70s, and this is a disease that usually presents And it has a higher risk of progressing to a more aggressive blood cancer that's called acute myeloid leukemia, or EML. And the standard of care for patients with higher risk myelodysplastic syndromes is chemotherapy. That form of chemotherapy is called hypermethylating agents. And one of the things that has been questioned in the past is, are our current response criteria sufficient to recapture patient-centered outcomes, including overall survival, but also quality of life, including improvement in blood counts? And the PREA's response criteria were developed in 2006, and some of the response criteria that were included in those initial iterations, they did not recapture overall survival. So in 2023, there was an international expert panel convened, and I was fortunate to be part of this, that revised the response criteria for myelodysplastic syndromes. However, there has really been no data that evaluated how good are those new response criteria, and are they actually better than the response criteria that we had previously. So in the abstract that I was presenting at this year's ASH annual meeting, we evaluated the new response criteria in a group of patients with higher risk myelodysplastic syndromes who were treated with hypermethylating agents across 14 centers in the United States. And we had a total of 762 patients that were included in this study, and we could re-identify that the new response criteria capture really meaningful and clinically relevant outcomes, including overall survival, which I still think is the most important outcome for patients. And I think this is really encouraging and supports that we use those new response criteria for clinical trials, as well as in routine clinical practice. And I'm fortunate to be part of this big collaboration, and I feel this is really patient-centered outcomes, and that not just captured improvement in numbers, but also translate to an overall survival benefit.