BETA - How long does someone live with acute myeloid leukemia?

How long does someone live with AML? How long a patient can live with AML is very variable and dependent on a lot of different factors. So it is very hard to give a blanket answer of one year or two years. The first important piece of information from a prognostic standpoint for acute myeloid leukemia is age. We know that older patients generally don't tolerate the same types of therapies that younger patients do, and biologically those patients didn't live as long or have as good outcomes as younger patients did. That might not be as relevant now as we have much better therapies for even older patients with AML. But the second most important piece beyond age is all of the factors of the leukemia that we detect at diagnosis, and those are the mutations, the chromosomes. And that puts people into different risk groups in acute myeloid leukemia that can help us prognosticate what the short-term and long-term expected outcome is with different therapies. Our treatments have evolved quite drastically in the last five years, whereby the clinical outcomes of these patients are really improving year to year with some of our new therapies that are available. And of course, the life expectancy varies tremendously based upon these genetic subgroups. For instance, if a younger person comes in and has one of these better risk chromosome abnormalities like an 821 translocation or inversion 16, we know that they have got about a 60 to 65 percent chance of being cured with standard chemotherapy. For older individuals who can't necessarily tolerate aggressive chemotherapy or stem cell transplantation, the prognosis is worse. Now, this is actually a great story because not so long ago, we would tell this person, and without treatment, your life expectancy is about three to six months. There was a lot of research done in looking at lower intensity types of treatments for older individuals in particular or even those patients who had medical problems and couldn't tolerate aggressive chemotherapy. So, as a class of medicines, they were licensed for a related disease called myelodysplastic syndrome, the so-called hypomethylating agents. And with this, we were able to extend people's survival to around eight months to a year. And most recently, there's been a medication licensed called Venetoclax that we add to this that now has extended people's survival even further. So we're talking more of survival in the 15 to 18-month range. We need to do better, obviously, and in fact, we're now building on this as a foundation to add additional drugs that don't necessarily have overlapping side effects, but hopefully we can improve upon this. We can cure some people with AML. Others, we can certainly extend their life, but the individual prognosis really varies greatly based on age and based on these chromosomal and genetic abnormalities that we've talked about. So the duration of life expectancy for a patient with AML at first is unknowable for the specific patient. Of course, we have population data, but that only goes so far in understanding the individual patient. Because we talked a lot already about the disease factors, but that has to be complemented by the specific patient. How healthy is the patient? What are the patient's goals? What risks and potential benefits is the patient willing to accept with these therapeutic options when we think about treating their leukemia? So for every patient, the potential outcome can be very different. There are some patients who have, despite all of our best intentions, a lower chance of surviving six months to a year, and many other patients who we anticipate a great chance of cure in many, many years of good quality life.