Treatment Advances for Aging AML Patients

Treatment Advances for Aging AML Patients from Patient Empowerment Network on Vimeo.

What are the latest acute myeloid leukemia (AML) treatment advances for elderly patients? Dr. David Sallman shares details about new therapies that he’s excited about and their impact on care for all AML patient groups.

Dr. David Sallman is an Assistant Member in the Department of Malignant Hematology at Moffitt Cancer Center where he specializes in myelodysplastic syndromes (MDS), acute myeloid leukemia (AML) and myeloproliferative neoplasms (MPN). Learn more about Dr. Sallman, here.

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Transcript:

Katherine:

Okay. When it comes to AML research and emerging treatment options, what specifically are you excited about?

Dr. Sallman:

Yeah. So, I think probably the most exciting changes have really been in the overall elderly AML setting, although I think are really broadly impactful across patients.

So, the standard has been hypomethylating agents for a long time. This paradigm has recently changed with the FDA approval and now full approval of venetoclax in combination with hypomethylating agents, but we’re still talking about immediate overall survival of 14 months in the Phase III setting.

There are lots of exciting drugs, and I think this is really where the spectrum of myelodysplastic syndrome and acute myeloid leukemia comes into play.

So, I really think in elderly AML, we’re moving towards more triplet type combinations to really ideally move the field forward. That adds levels of complexity, toxicity from additional therapies, but we’re really hoping to truly move that survival curve even more.

There’s a lot of HMA, doublet, triplet combinations that are exciting and I think that’s really where the field is going.

I think at the same time in the failure setting, particularly, let’s say, in the HMA venetoclax failure setting, there’s really a lack of almost any effective therapies. We’re really hoping that novel cellular and immunotherapies will hold significant promise in this group. There are numerous trials that are being considered in this space, but I’m hopeful for it.