What Treatments Are on the Horizon for Acute Myeloid Leukemia Patients?

What Treatments Are on the Horizon for Acute Myeloid Leukemia Patients?

What Treatments Are on the Horizon for Acute Myeloid Leukemia Patients? from Patient Empowerment Network on Vimeo.

What can acute myeloid leukemia (AML) patients expect in the future of AML studies? Watch as expert Dr. Catherine Lai shares insight about the state of FDA approvals. what is in pipeline for AML treatment, and disease monitoring technologies for improved patient care.

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Transcript:

Sasha Tanori:

Is the future bright in AML treatment, and can you speak about any exciting studies that you are working on, that AML patients and their families should stay tuned for?

Dr. Catherine Lai:

Yes, so I am excited. I am excited to say that I think in my lifetime, I will be a part of AML change and we have already seen it. I have mentors who are in their 60s, who have used the same therapies, they use them for the entirety of their career. And so, as I mentioned, we only have your nine FDA approvals. I think there are more coming…I think what I would like to mention is I think the use of immunotherapy, bone marrow transplant is the original immunotherapy, but as you know, there are many risks and benefits and complications. And so how we manipulate the immune system or how we use drugs to help manipulate the immune system, I think it’s a work in progress. It has been more successful in other cancers, not as successful in AML yet, but I think we will get there. The other thing would be, is how…we look at minimal residual disease. So, as you know, but for everybody else, we consider a complete remission is less than anything less than 5 percent blast or 5 percent leukemia cells but we know that anything greater than zero is bad, and you have more than zero, the disease will come back at some point.

So looking to how we monitor, going back to those molecular technologies and how we’re monitoring for residual disease so that we can detect disease faster, so I think really the concept of detection and prevention will come into a huge role because also if we can detect the disease relapse sooner, we’re treating less disease and then there’s less side effects and less toxicity, and then I think the last thing would be health outcomes of a lot of what we’ve been talking about just in terms of the whole picture and how we can better treat these patients I also think there’s a huge role for looking at each individual person and their age and their medical problems, and they’re a physiologic age as opposed to their chronological age and how we can best treat the patient so they can have the best outcome.