What Is in the Treatment Pipeline for Patients With MPNs?
What Is in the Treatment Pipeline for Patients With MPNs? from Patient Empowerment Network on Vimeo.
What does the MPN treatment pipeline hold for patients? MPN expert Dr. Claire Harrison from Guy’s and St. Thomas’ Hospital in London shares insight about future treatments and the outlook for care.
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Transcript:
Dr. Nicole Rochester:
Can you share a little about what’s in the robust pipeline of potential therapies for patients with MPN, what is it that you’re excited about? And is the future bright in this area?
Dr. Claire Harrison:
I think the future is really bright from the point of view of de-escalating treatment as well as newer treatment, so I think it’s important to point that because all treatments have potential complications inside of it, so as we understand that some of these conditions may have very low risk for patients, it’s important to understand that, and de-intensify, I call that calreticulin (post ET?), I would also call out ET, essential thrombocythemia, which lacks a known driver mutation, so-called triple-negative ET, emerging data suggests that may have very low risk for patients, but what you all want to hear about, of course, is what’s new treatment-wise.
So I think just to call out, I’m really excited that there will be a new trial this year for ET patients with Bomedemstat, which is an LSD-1 inhibitor, new target, new molecule. We’ve been testing it in myelofibrosis and we’ve tested it now in a bunch of patients with ET, and it seems to be very efficiently reducing the platelet count not affecting hemoglobin and patients appear to get a good benefit with regard to fatigue, which we know is the number one symptom for patients with MPN, so I’m excited about that because it’s been a long time since we’ve had a new treatment for patients with ET. And then for patients with PV, increasingly across the globe, the availability of this newer formulation of interferon, Besremi is becoming more available and the latest data with that agent suggests that it may be superior to standard therapy such as hydroxyurea, hydroxycarbamide in terms of clotting, et cetera, is really important.
Interestingly, and we may both have to think back to our med school days on this, we’ve been targeting the iron pathway for patients with PV. So I always tell my patients with PV, do not let anyone give you iron tablets without speaking to one of our team because that’s like putting oxygen on the fire, it’s like feeding the red cell production. So there is a new agent called Rusfertide PTG-300, which targets the iron pathway and allows iron to build up in the body, but it doesn’t allow it to get to the bone marrow and so, this is a new treatment for PV patients, which might reduce the need for iron removal by phlebotomy or venesection, and has been also shown to give symptomatic benefit, and then of course, there’s a bunch of new treatments for patients with myelofibrosis, that’s probably the busiest part of the portfolio at the moment.
We’ve just seen positive data with me momelotinib, which is one of the fourth JAK inhibitors, very strong data from the MOMENTUM study, good results in patients even with low platelet counts down to 25, and then I’m really excited to see strong data coming with navitoclax and pelabresib, which are other agents targeted at are the pathways in myelofibrosis. And then finally, in Denmark, they’ve been looking at vaccination strategies, and I know my patients are really interested in vaccination and gene editing. I don’t have anything new to say on gene editing), but I do have something new to say on vaccination.
So in Denmark, they’ve been looking at producing a vaccination against the calreticulin mutation, Nicole, because it’s expressed on the surface of the blood cells, so antibodies can find it. So this is ongoing, no positive result as yet, but it’s still ongoing and there are newer taking off with regards to vaccination structures, and I think that’s really exciting.
