BETA - Is there a cure for acute myeloid leukemia?

Is there a cure for AML? There is a potential cure for AML. However, it really depends on the different risk groups that people fall into based on the abnormalities that are present at diagnosis. In many of our patients, we recommend what's called a bone marrow transplant, especially for patients who do not have the favorable sort of risk abnormalities. And a bone marrow transplant can lead to a cure in a proportion of patients with AML. So AML is a very different type of cancer than other cancers that we think about because there is that potential cure even in patients who have very poor risk or high risk disease. And then on the other hand, there are a proportion of patients who are diagnosed with what we call favorable risk disease. And these patients can be cured with standard chemotherapy agents even without a bone marrow transplant. So this is a potential cancer that we can and strive to cure. So I think that there are for sure many patients who are cured of AML. In terms of how we're able to do that, it really depends upon the specific features of the leukemia and the patient. So for a fit patient who has a favorable risk acute myeloid leukemia, we can cure many of those patients with just chemotherapy. Just. It's a lot to go through. But it's still chemotherapy without resorting to something like a bone marrow transplant. But for a favorable risk leukemia patient, we may be able to use what we call induction chemotherapy and consolidation chemotherapy to really cure the patient for patients with acute myeloid leukemia where there are higher risk features of the disease. That's where we worry even more. We worry that even if we were to get the patient into a remission, we worry that because of those disease features that fundamentally that disease might be resistant to chemo. And so we worry basically that even if we were to get the patient remission, they might be more likely to relapse later. So that is where we would think about a bone marrow transplant potentially. For the appropriate patient though, for a patient who is otherwise healthy enough to undergo it and fit and wants to go through it because it's a lot to go through. But those are sort of the general approaches to cure right now. Chemotherapy for our fit patients who are favorable and then treatment either in the form of chemotherapy or highly effective but non-intensive therapies like venetoclaxidase society for example, leading to bone marrow transplant for the intermediate and higher risk patients.