Emerging AML Treatments: What Is Menin Inhibitor Therapy?
Emerging AML Treatments: What Is Menin Inhibitor Therapy? from Patient Empowerment Network on Vimeo.
How does menin inhibitor therapy work to treat acute myeloid leukemia (AML)? Dr. Sanam Loghavi discusses how this novel targeted therapy in clinical trials is showing promise for patients with the NPM1 mutation or the KMT2A mutation.
Dr. Sanam Loghavi is a hematopathologist and molecular pathologist at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. Learn more about Dr. Loghavi.
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Transcript:
Katherine Banwell:
Let’s talk about this new groundbreaking menin inhibitor therapy. Can you go into more detail about what the therapy is and who it might be right for?
Dr. Sanam Loghavi:
Sure. So, right now, the drug really has been tested in the setting of relapsed refractory disease, meaning for patients whose disease has already been treated but has relapsed. And there are certain genetic subtypes of acute myeloid leukemia that are eligible for this disease, or unamenable, sorry, to this targeted therapy. So, these include acute myeloid leukemias with NPM1 mutation or acute myeloid leukemias with KMT2A, or formerly known as the MLL gene-rearrangement.
And the reason for this that these alterations, these genetic alterations lead to an apparent interaction of menin with KMT2A and the leukemia depends on this interaction. So, what the Menin inhibitor does, it eliminates this interaction and so it’s used for therapy in patients that have this genetic change.
Katherine Banwell:
Are there other menin inhibitors in development?
Dr. Sanam Loghavi:
There are.
Katherine Banwell:
And what are they?
Dr. Sanam Loghavi:
There are several specific ones that are being tested of different names. So, the one that MD Anderson just published on is revumenib, but there are several ones that are in development.
Katherine Banwell:
And what about these other inhibitors are showing promise?
Dr. Sanam Loghavi:
So, if you think about AML, in general, really the only curative therapy that we have, outside of the favorable risk disease, is hematopoietic stem cell transplant.
And hematopoietic stem cell transplant is not a trivial treatment, it has a lot of side effects in and of itself. So, the goal really is to be able to treat patients with less intensive therapies. And the goal of these targeted therapies is to provide patients with less intensive therapies even compared with chemotherapy, with conventional chemotherapy that tends to be toxic. So, the goal is really to be smart about it and try to figure out how the pathogenesis of disease is developed and to try and eliminate the pathways that that cancer is using to proliferate.
Katherine Banwell:
If patients are interested in this menin inhibitor therapy, where do they start? Are there trials outside of MD Anderson?
Dr. Sanam Loghavi:
Yes. These are multi-institutional trials, and I will tell you that the best resource to identify clinical trials is essentially clinicaltrials.gov, dot G-O-V. So, you can go there and look up the active clinical trials by disease type, by location. So, that is the best resource to identify clinical trials.
