An Expert Summary of Current MPN Treatment Options
An Expert Summary of Current MPN Treatment Options from Patient Empowerment Network on Vimeo.
MPN expert, Lindsey Lyle, provides an overview of therapies used to treat myelofibrosis (MF), polycythemia vera (PV) and essential thrombocythemia (ET).
Lindsey Lyle is a physician assistant at the University of Colorado Cancer Center, specializing in hematological malignancies with a subspecialty in myeloproliferative neoplasms (MPNs). More about this expert here.
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Transcript:
Lindsey:
To overview the treatment types for MPNs, we have a variety of different mechanisms in which we use, and clumping these three main MPNs together, we can kind of break it down into, first of all, cytoreductive therapy, which is nonspecific, but really just reduces the amount of cells the bone marrow is producing. And so, it’s really to control the blood counts. And, different types of cytoreductive therapy generally are – hydroxyurea is used probably the most commonly.
There are some other sorts of chemotherapy that may be used in different instances. We also have biological agents, such as interferons, that may be used in patients with MPNs. We then have JAK inhibitors, which there are two FDA-approved JAK inhibitors at this point for myelofibrosis, and one approved for polycythemia vera.
We also have a variety of novel agents in clinical trials. These may be inhibiting different pathways of the cellular production or different signaling pathways at the level of the stem cell, so there are a variety of those. We also use hypomethylating agents in some patients who maybe have higher-risk disease, mainly myelofibrosis, that really changes the way that the stem cells are produced in the bone marrow in order to control the cell counts and also symptoms.
So, there are a variety of therapeutic measures that are taken. Additionally, not necessarily medication-related, but phlebotomy, which is considered a therapy for polycythemia vera, is generally used in order to reduce red blood cell volume, and then, aspirin is commonly used, especially in polycythemia vera and essential thrombocythemia as a supportive care medication to reduce risk of complications from the disease.
