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Elevate | What You Should Know About Your Role in AML Treatment and Care Decisions
Elevate | What You Should Know About Your Role in AML Treatment and Care Decisions from Patient Empowerment Network on Vimeo.
How can you elevate your AML care and treatment? AML expert Dr. Gail Roboz discusses the importance of participating in AML treatment decisions, reviews key factors that may impact therapy options, and shares advice for advocating for yourself.
Dr. Gail Roboz is director of the Clinical and Translational Leukemia Programs and professor of medicine at Weill Cornell Medicine and the New York Presbyterian Hospital. Learn more about Dr. Roboz.
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Thriving With AML | Advice for Setting Goals and Making Treatment Decisions |
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Transcript:
Katherine Banwell:
Hello, and welcome. I’m your host, Katherine Banwell. It’s no secret that the quality-of-care patients receive can vary, and patients who are educated about their condition and involved in their care may have improved outcomes. That’s why the Patient Empowerment Network created the Elevate series, to help AML patients and their care partners feel well-informed when making treatment decisions with their healthcare team.
In today’s program, an AML expert will join us to share advice for accessing better overall care. Before we get into the discussion, please remember that this program is not a substitute for seeking medical advice. Please refer to your healthcare team about what might be best for you. Well, let’s meet our guest today. Joining us is Dr. Gail Roboz. Dr. Roboz, would you please introduce yourself?
Dr. Gail Roboz:
Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me. My name is Gail Roboz. I’m a professor of medicine and director of the clinical and translational leukemia programs at Weill Cornell Medicine and the NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital in New York City. Thank you again for having me.
Katherine Banwell:
Well, thank you so much for joining us today. We really appreciate it. I’d like to start by discussing your role as a researcher. You’re on the frontlines for advancements in the AML field. What led you here, and why is it important to you?
Dr. Gail Roboz:
So, I’m actually asked that question quite frequently, because AML is a challenging, difficult, scary disease, and people don’t necessarily assume that somebody in medical school would gravitate toward it.
But I have to say that what is incredibly fascinating back then and now about leukemia is the continuous access to the disease. Patients will maybe giggle or groan as I’m saying that, because you can get a blood sample really anytime. You can even get a bone marrow sample anytime, although patients don’t enjoy that so much.
But from a research perspective, it is absolutely extraordinary to be dealing with a disease where you can, in real time, truly run back and forth to a laboratory and see what’s happening, what is the new drug or the old drug doing, what’s happening with the patient, and I would say that from a fascination of a medical student perspective that grabbed me then and still does today.
Katherine Banwell:
When it comes to choosing therapy for AML, it’s important to work with your healthcare team to identify what will work best for you, the patient. So, I’d like to know how you define shared decision-making.
Dr. Gail Roboz:
The problem with AML sometimes is that it can be such an acute, emergency-type of presentation and urgent decision-making that I think your question is almost right out of the gate for some patients that will, “Wait, I don’t even have a minute, here. How do I build a team, do the research, look online if people are telling me that I’m in the middle of an emergency?”
That isn’t always the case for acute leukemia, but it sometimes is. I think that what happens in AML in particular for patients is a building of knowledge and a building of the team, and figuring out, first of all, where am I when I am being told this diagnosis, and is it really an emergency? Do I have to make decisions really right now, because is it life-threatening today, I don’t have time to look around? Or do I have a minute to pause and get more information?
I definitely feel that with the Internet era and with so much connection between doctors and teams, there is much more ability to reach out instantaneously for doctors, too, to get advice on a patient who might be in a smaller hospital that doesn’t have AML experience. But I think that the first thing is to try to figure out very, very quickly, what needs to happen to me as a patient immediately, and what can wait a minute, so that I can figure out what am I being told, and what are my options?
Katherine Banwell:
Right, right. It can be confusing for patients, just finding out this new information. Part of making care decisions is setting goals. What are AML treatment goals, and how are they determined?
Dr. Gail Roboz:
I would say that leaving cure on the table from the beginning is always a good place to start, because you want to figure out, first of all, what am I dealing with? What are the actual options?
But when AML strikes, and a patient who has multiple medical conditions or comorbidities that are truly compromising function independently of the diagnosis of AML, that’s going to be a special path of what is actually reasonable for someone who is terribly medically ill or otherwise frail right from the beginning? That can be defining goals, but I think from the beginning, the best thing is to leave everything on the table. What can actually be done to make me better, first of all, to get me out of my immediate trouble? What can be done to make me better, and if I’m getting better, well, I like that, how do I stay there?
What can be done to hang on to the state of ‘better,’ which is sometimes defined as remission? In AML, the goal is to get the bone marrow working again, functioning again, get rid of the acute emergency problem, if there is one, which there may or may not be in acute leukemia.
Sometimes it’s truly an emergency, and sometimes it isn’t. But once I get better, can I stay there? What is required to keep me with a working bone marrow for as long as possible?
But once you are starting to sort through the diagnosis, you realize that saying that somebody has acute myeloid leukemia is not telling me nearly enough information. This is a disease that is what we call biologically heterogeneous, which means there are lots of different forms. It’s like saying you’re sick. What exactly does that mean? There are lots of things that can make you sick. There are lots of different subtypes of AML, and fairly quickly in most institutions, we start getting back some information specifically on the subtype and biological characteristics of the disease.
This can be very, very important in the initial treatment planning, and depending on where you are, the information that you get back can sometimes take 24 hours, 48 hours, 72 hours, a week. So, you start learning very quickly though that, “If I’m not in a complete emergency that requires instantaneous treatment, can I get back more information about the biological subtype of the disease so that I can start treatment planning of what is my best option right out of the gate?” That’s usually called induction, or the first therapy that you’re going to get with the goal, ‘getting rid of leukemia cells and getting into remission.’ That’s part one, and then everything that comes after that is about keeping you in remission.
But for the initial goal, what is the therapy that the patient needs to get to get into remission? In order to figure that out, the good news is there are a lot of different ways to slice and dice getting into remission, and actually, it used to be such a weighty decision.
Now, I would actually encourage people to – not relax, you can never use the word ‘relax’ with acute leukemia. But there are several different induction strategies for most patients that would be okay.
So, even if you get started with one strategy and you hear five days later that another doctor might do something different, there are a lot of ways to safely get into remission. I think everybody should be pleased about the fact that we’re doing much better than we used to for patients across the board, all the way from children to much older adults, to safely getting people into remission.
Katherine Banwell:
Right. So, what sort of factors then do you take into consideration when you’re choosing a therapy?
Dr. Gail Roboz:
So, out of the gate, there are the patients that I think I referred to earlier who truly, truly are in situations based on their other diseases that there are certain treatments we would just cross out right out of the gate.
If there are patients with very, very severely compromised cardiac or renal or lung function or are terribly ill from other conditions, AML doctors will right out of the gate for those patients eliminate certain treatments. But absent that scenario, what we try to look for is the biology of the disease. Not look at the age, not look at the comorbidities unless they are so severe that they make obvious certain choices.
But rather, what I like to do is say, “What kind of AML is this, and what is the best treatment that I have to get this patient into remission?” And then ask the question, “can this particular patient handle this therapy?” Sometimes, these days, there actually may be more than one route to get to remission depending on the biology of the disease, and then, if that’s the case, then I can start getting picky and look at the individual patient. Where does the patient live? Who’s the patient’s family? What other diseases has the patient been treated for?
Is there something that I can use? If I have a choice, if there are a couple of different things that might work, how do I fit the treatment to best take care of the needs of this particular patient? If I don’t have choices, then my question is, “Okay, how do I get this patient through my one therapy that I think is the truly, truly best option?”
Katherine Banwell:
Okay. I’d like to turn to test results for a moment. What sort of tests should be done following an AML diagnosis?
Dr. Gail Roboz:
We often generally recommend a bone marrow biopsy, even if we know we can make the diagnosis from a blood test, because even though the bone marrow biopsy is not the most fun test in the world, it does offer better information for follow-up care than what you can get initially from the blood.
So, every once in a while, we do have a patient for whom a bone marrow biopsy itself for whatever reason can’t be done. But almost always, we need a bone marrow biopsy, and on that biopsy, you’re going to look under the microscope and see what the cells look like. You’re going to get back standard testing, which is called flow cytometry, which is going to tell the difference between what are the different cells that you’re seeing under the microscope.
But then you’re actually going to get progressively much more fancy testing, including things called chromosomes or cytogenetics, and then ultimately, the majority of patients, if at all possible, will be having mutational testing to identify certain subgroups of AML that benefit from very particular treatments. Next-generation sequencing, PCR, fusion proteins, FISH, cytogenetics, I can go on and on with all kinds of terminology that is very confusing, even to hematology fellows, let alone to patients.
Usually, we use a combination of tests to decide, “Is this patient likely to be able to be cured with chemotherapy alone, or might this patient benefit from a stem cell transplant from somebody else after they go into remission?”
That’s basically what the prognostic scoring systems used to be asking, but now it’s a lot more complicated than that. Because even in the favorable categories, even in the adverse categories, where there used to be very little subtlety, now there is a lot of subtlety.
It’s all about defining getting into remission, and what do I give you once you’re in remission to keep you there? It’s no longer this windshield wiper thing of good, bad, transplant, no transplant. There’s a lot more to AML than there used to be.
Katherine Banwell:
I’d like to add that if you, the viewer, are interested in learning more about AML testing and treatment, PEN has a number of resources available for you. You can find these at powerfulpatients.org/AML, or by scanning the QR code on your screen.
Before we get into specific treatment types, Dr. Roboz, would you provide a brief explanation of the phases of therapy for AML? You mentioned induction therapy earlier. Would you tell us what that is?
Dr. Gail Roboz:
Yeah. So, here, too, I have to say that it’s more confusing than it used to be for the following reasons. So, historically and currently, we typically talk about induction as the first therapy that you’re going to get to get into remission.
Then, the treatment paradigm is you do something to get into remission; do some treatment to get into remission. After that, in the realm of post-remission therapy, there are different things that can happen. There can be something called consolidation, which might be another round of chemotherapy. Some patients get consolidation, some patients don’t. After consolidation, there can be a transplant.
So, you get into remission, you may or may not get a little bit of what’s called consolidation chemotherapy, and then go on to a transplant.
However, sometimes either after the transplant or after chemotherapy before ever getting or instead of ever getting a transplant, there might be ongoing treatment in a lower intensity ongoing basis that is called maintenance.
So, you’ve got to think about it as induction as what happens first, consolidation is something that happens when you’re in remission, and then maintenance usually refers to ongoing therapy that is different from consolidation.
It’s usually lower intensity, easier to take, oral types of treatment that may go on and on. And just to be incredibly confusing, it’s different from something like breast cancer, where often the patients are given, “You get six cycles of this, and then you’re done.” From AML, there’s actually often not that type of an obvious plan right out of the gate for the patient.
The answer will be, “It depends.” It depends. It depends how your treatment looks at this point in time. It depends how you look at this point in time.
So then, the patients say, “Well, aren’t you going to cure me of this? What are you doing? Aren’t you going to get rid of it?” So, historically, there are some patients who get cured with chemotherapy. They get chemotherapy to get into remission, they get some chemotherapy afterwards, and there’s a cure rate for some patients with that. The majority of patients who are cured with AML get an allotransplant, or a transplant from somebody else.
Then there’s a whole group of patients where we’re asking the question now, is it possible to get those patients beyond five years – so in oncology, five years is typically defined as cure. Can we get some patients with ongoing therapy to that past-five-year mark without a transplant? That’s in the zone of the ‘coming soon.’ Don’t have a ton of patients in that group right now, but hopefully we will.
Katherine Banwell:
You’ve mentioned some various treatment types that are used to treat AML. Can you share a brief overview of available treatments?
Dr. Gail Roboz:
So, the terminology that we use is a little bit annoying, because it is a little bit general. We say intensive and not intensive.
But historically, intensive chemotherapy referred to a combination of generally two types of agents, cytarabine (Cytosar-U) and an anthracycline, which is a class of chemotherapy, that either just those two together or in combination with sometimes a third or a fourth drug usually keeps people in the hospital for around a month. Not that the chemotherapy takes that long, but the treatment gets rid of basically a lot of cells in the bone marrow, good guys and bad guys, and it takes about three weeks for those normal cells to recover.
So, a standard intensive induction for AML is often around three to four weeks in the hospital, somewhere between three and five or so days of chemotherapy up front, depending on exactly what the protocol is. The classic regimen is actually still called 3+7, three days of one drug, seven of the other. But there are many variations of that that work.
The chemo is then stopped, the patient hangs out in the hospital, very frequently getting transfusions and antibiotics, and we wait for the bone marrow to recover.
Another current path that many patients are getting – almost all older patients, with ‘older’ being defined not by a specific age cutoff, but often 75 and older, almost everybody agrees no longer gets the classic chemotherapy that I just described. At some institutions, that 75 is going down, and even 70 and 65 and above are getting a new type of therapy, mostly because the new type of therapy is working pretty well. That is a combination of something called a hypomethylating agent.
Drugs like azacitidine (Vidaza, Onureg) or decitabine (Dacogen) in combination with a pill that has changed the landscape of AML more than any other called venetoclax (Venclexta). Venetoclax is a drug that is not exclusively used for AML.
It actually was originally approved for another type of leukemia. But I think that not many people would argue with the statement that what has changed absolutely the face of AML treatment has been this drug, because it’s a BCL2 inhibitor. What it does is it actually – cancer cells and leukemia cells in particular are very, very good at staying alive.
They don’t undergo cell death, they don’t want to die, and venetoclax brings down their forcefield so that those cells can actually undergo apoptosis and die.
Venetoclax in combination with azacitidine or decitabine has transformed the care of the disease, because many patients older than 65 – and the median age of diagnosis of AML is around 68 to 70. So, many patients never were well enough to have the intensive therapy. They weren’t going into remission, and they weren’t having prolonged survival often beyond a few months.
But now, those patients do actually much better with the combination of aza [azacitidine] and venetoclax. So typically, the induction path is going to be deciding who gets an intensive therapy backbone, usually associated with long hospitalization. Who gets a less intensive backbone – by the way, that is often associated with just the same hospitalization. So, that’s why I don’t love the term ‘low intensity,’ because that implies that it doesn’t work.
It does, and it also implies that you’re not going to be in the hospital. You probably will, because in the same way as for the more so-called intensive therapies, getting into remission involves getting rid of bone marrow cells and waiting for the normal ones to recover. Even if you are a patient who is getting the venetoclax combined with the azacitidine or decitabine, which is typically called low intensity, you may very well be in the hospital for a month.
Because depending on where you live and who your family is and how sick you might be, you will probably want us to watch you carefully during that first month, but it’s worth it. Because if you have a good chance of getting into remission, remission is what makes life better and life longer. So, we want to get patients into remission, even if it means upfront time in the hospital.
Katherine Banwell:
You mentioned one inhibitor as targeted therapy, but there are a couple of others. Would you briefly tell us about those?
Dr. Gail Roboz:
So, over the years recently, we have identified certain specific targets in AML which are resulting in the addition of medications on these standard backbones. So, the target for venetoclax is something called BCL2, and actually, venetoclax probably makes all chemotherapy better. It’s kind of a controversial statement, but I’m going to stand by it. But in AML, it has been shown that the addition of venetoclax to lots of different backbones makes them work better. There are other things to hit, though.
For example, there are patients with AML who have something called a FLT3, F-L-T-3 mutation. This mutation also has specific inhibitors that are FDA-approved drugs that target specifically the FLT3 mutation, and if you have one of those, your doctor may add on a FLT3 inhibitor to either a lower intensity or an intensive backbone. Similarly, there are agents called IDH inhibitors. There are IDH1 and IDH2 inhibitors.
If I start getting into isocitrate dehydrogenase pathways on this webinar, I think everybody will click off, because it’s certainly bored all of the medical students in med school, and it’s pretty tough to understand. But the bottom line is it’s very cool stuff because that boring pathway in medical school that nobody really thought about too much is actually part of very, very, central cellular functions that are a vulnerability now that have been identified in leukemic cells that, if you hit them with these specific inhibitors, patients do better.
Now, couple of things for patients. It doesn’t mean that it’s better to have a FLT3 or an IDH mutation because the targeted therapies are available. So, a lot of patients are disappointed when they don’t have mutations. I don’t want you to think in that way. It’s not that it’s better, it’s different.
It identifies a different biology. If you have certain mutations, there are certain medications that may help you more.
That’s why I think the patients are learning quickly, too, to ask the doc – they may not remember the letters of the alphabet soup, but “Do I have something about my AML that can get one of these targeted therapies added on?” I think is a good question to think about. “Do I have something about my disease that has a specific drug that we’ve already learned makes outcomes better?”
Katherine Banwell:
There’s a new emerging therapy as well. Is it the menin inhibitor?
Dr. Gail Roboz:
I think that, in understanding different targets and different pathways, it leads me to a general statement that if you can get yourself potentially onto a clinical trial at an academic center, that is something to consider right out of the gate. Because there is a lot, a lot, a lot going on in this field right now.
What we are hoping, and the reason that I am talking to you about venetoclax and FLT3 inhibitors and IDH inhibitors, is because of all the patients who jumped onto those clinical trials and proved that those drugs are better. Some of them are my patients! I was fortunate on some of those early trials to have some real winners in patients who got onto the trials. They’re the ones who drove the success.
So, for example, menin inhibitors, which are very, very exciting, targeted agents for NPM1 and KMT2A mutations and rearrangements – these are complicated to remember as a patient, but there’s a cool drug out there that might be for you. I think that patients who really think about asking the question wherever they are, the “Hey, I just got a diagnosis of AML. Is there a clinical trial that might look good for me?” I think is a great question to ask pretty much out of the gate.
Katherine Banwell:
The symptoms of AML as well as the side effects of certain medications can vary greatly among patients. So, how do you approach symptom management with your patients?
Dr. Gail Roboz:
Patients will giggle because I repeat this line. You have to be afraid of the disease, not the treatment. I think that if you read the package insert on a Tylenol, you’re certainly not going to think you’re going to live for more than 20 minutes if you take one of those. You can certainly appreciate that, with chemotherapy drugs and including some of the novel agents that I’m talking about, if you read package inserts and look at some of the signs and symptoms and things that can happen, it’s extraordinarily overwhelming.
I think that a lot of what I do for patients is I keep them close. Because if the patient is in the hospital or coming in very frequently in clinic, I think that that everyday assessment of, “What are you experiencing?” and “What can I tell you is the disease’s fault, and what can I tell you is the medication’s fault?” is so, so important.
Especially in the newly diagnosed patients, where the disease is active. Of course, we want to try to minimize anything that we can do to make the process better for patients, more comfortable for patients, but there are certain things that we do tell people, “You’ve got to slug through this particular problem, because this is the disease’s fault.” This is different from a patient in remission, where they might be getting ongoing therapy with something, or we say, “Hey, wait a minute. You’d be feeling fine, except now you’re taking this medication. How do we minimize messing up quality of life in remission?”
Because we want you to feel great when you’re in remission. I think the real answer of that is to have a really close collaboration with the healthcare team, and for the patients to really understand – I repeat this because it’s so important. What is the disease’s fault, and what is the treatment’s fault? If there’s something that is therapy-related, do I have a substitute or do I not have a substitute?
Because if the drug is essential to get us where we need to go, well, what can we do to manage comfort and to manage symptoms until you get to the place where your marrow is working again?
Katherine Banwell:
That’s great advice, Dr. Roboz. I would like to get to an audience question that we received prior to the program. This one comes from Johanna. “How can I better understand my lab test results? What questions should I be asking my provider about those results?”
Dr. Gail Roboz:
One of the things that I would say to patients is to be careful when interpreting your own results, because I really am not exaggerating to say that patients have had absolute trauma looking at things that I look at it and say, “Oh, this looks great.” So, the first thing is, be careful being your own doctor.
The second thing though is that the author of the question has to understand that there’s going to be a tsunami of data coming in with respect to AML treatment. Sometimes in the hospital on a daily basis when you’re in the middle of an induction, there is a true – tsunami is the right word – a deluge of data, and you have to work with your team to say, “What am I following here? What’s important at this phase in my treatment? What’s the number I’m looking at?” Patients sometimes tell me, “I don’t want to know any of this,” and I’m fine with that.
I think it’s actually okay. Sometimes patients will say, “Give me guidance,” and I will be specific. Because you can actually have a leukemia induction patient where every single laboratory value is abnormal. They might be getting pushed to a device, in the morning, sitting in the hospital on your iPad, 50 abnormal results. You’re trying to battle back the disease and be positive and advocate for yourself, but there are 50 abnormal results in front of you.
I think you have to really work with the team to say, “What am I looking at today? What are the numbers that are the really important ones? There are 50 abnormal ones here; everything is getting a yellow or a red light in this. How do I go through this?”
And to appreciate, also, that at different points in the treatment, the beginning of treatment induction post-remission therapy, you’re looking for different things. So, work with your team so that you’re not assessing every single result with equivalent weight, because I think you’re going to stress yourself out.
Katherine Banwell:
That’s great advice, Dr. Roboz. Thank you. As we close out the program, I’d like to find out what you would like to leave the audience with. Why are you hopeful?
Dr. Gail Roboz:
AML is changing incredibly rapidly. And I can tell you it is a lot more fun to be an AML doctor now than it used to be, with respect to what I am offering for patients. We have always fought really, really hard to have our wins, but we’re winning more. I do think that it is a complicated space to navigate for patients, but there is room for a lot of optimism.
I think we are getting patients transplanted – patients that we never thought would ever go through a transplant or getting transplanted. Patients who never had a chance of even living more than six or eight months or living much longer than that. Is it perfect? No. Do we have as many cures as we want?
No, but there’s a lot going on. I think if patients feel that excitement, they will also feel the need to ask about those clinical trials. Because I think that for a lot of patients, clinical trials is an area where they would be worried. They’re not sure that they want to. “I don’t want to be a guinea pig,” and yet here I can say in the AML space, one after another after another drug approvals in the last several years, with the patients on those trials being awfully happy that they participated.
So, I think that it’s a very, very terrifying diagnosis. There’s nothing that I can do to take the sting out of that. But try to find yourself in an optimistic place with options that are being offered to the very, very, very best that we can do. There are patients who are listening, I’m sure, who have relapsed or refractory disease who are not feeling that optimism.
I want to address you specifically, because we don’t have enough yet. We’re trying. When you have AML that has come back or come back multiply, that’s dangerous and difficult. But for those patients in particular, try really hard to get onto clinical trials. If the drugs that we have out there – if you’ve already taken them and they haven’t worked for you or if they’re not serving you well, if you’re in good shape and the drugs that we have aren’t good enough, well, let’s see if we can get you on something that’s investigational.
Katherine Banwell:
Dr. Roboz, thank you so much for taking the time to join us today.
Dr. Gail Roboz:
Thank you for having me.
Katherine Banwell:
I also want to thank all of our collaborators. To learn more about AML and to access tools to help you become a proactive patient, visit powerfulpatients.org. I’m Katherine Banwell. Thanks for joining us today.
Advancements in AML Treatment | Tailoring Therapies to Individual Patients
Advancements in AML Treatment | Tailoring Therapies to Individual Patients from Patient Empowerment Network on Vimeo.
What are the latest AML treatment advancements? Expert Dr. Sara Taveras Alam from UTHealth Houston discusses how treatments have advanced over recent years with personalized therapies beyond a one-size-fits-all approach.
[ACT]IVATION Tip
“…patients to be really informed about all of the details of their AML and ask questions about the genetic drivers of their disease and whether or not there are medications that can target those drivers. Similarly, the decision to do a stem cell transplant or not will be driven by this, so it’s very important for the patient to be informed about all of the details of their AML, not just the fact that they have acute myeloid leukemia diagnosis.”
Download Resource Guide | Descargar guía de recursos
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Transcript:
Lisa Hatfield:
Dr. Taveras, what are the latest advancements and treatment modalities for AML?
Dr. Sara Taveras Alam:
Well, over the last decade, there have been many new medications approved for the treatment of AML, and this has really allowed for the treatment of acute myeloid leukemia to be individualized rather than using a one-size-fits-all approach, so typically for us to decide the treatment that best suits the patient, we take into consideration patient characteristics and into consideration, their age and their fitness level, other medical problems that they may have, and we also take into consideration characteristics of the leukemia itself, so not all acute myeloid leukemia are the same, and we try to get as much information as we can about what is driving the acute myeloid leukemia to see how we can best attack it.
One of the medication groups that we have available to us over the last decade are FLT3 inhibitors, and that is a class of medication that directly targets FLT3 mutations that may be present in patients with AML, and if the patient does have a FLT3 mutation and they’re able to be started on this class of medication, they do a lot better than they would have done, say, 20 years ago without those medications being available. Similarly, we have medications that target IDH mutations, IDH1 or 2 that are options for our patients. We have less intensive chemotherapy that is more appropriate for older patients with comorbidities, perhaps maybe more tolerable than the traditional IV intensive chemotherapy.
So my activation tip for this question is for patients to be really informed about all of the details of their AML and ask questions about the genetic drivers of their disease and whether or not there are medications that can target those drivers. Similarly, the decision to do a stem cell transplant or not will be driven by this, so it’s very important for the patient to be informed about all of the details of their AML, not just the fact that they have acute myeloid leukemia diagnosis.
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How Molecular Markers Affect MPN Treatment | Advances in Research
How Molecular Markers Affect MPN Treatment | Advances in Research from Patient Empowerment Network on Vimeo.
Are there new molecular markers being discovered that could affect myeloproliferative neoplasm (MPN) care? Dr. Lucia Masarova explains common MPN driver mutations and what researchers are learning about recently discovered molecular markers, such as ASXL1.
Dr. Lucia Masarova is an MPN Specialist and Assistant Professor in the Department of Leukemia at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. Learn more about Dr. Masarova.
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Transcript:
Katherine Banwell:
Dr. Masarova, molecular testing is important for people diagnosed with MPNs and may help provide insight into effective treatment approaches. What are some new areas of research related to molecular markers?
Dr. Lucia Masarova:
Molecular markers are very relevant in our designs or thinking about myeloproliferative neoplasms. Not only treatments, but also the disease qualification or prognostication wherever since the discovery of the so-called driver mutations, which are the mutations responsible for the overproduction of the blood counts and disease pathogenesis.
Among them we have the most common, JAK2 mutation, then also calreticulin, MPL, or in some instances we don’t even understand and call it triple-negative.
There we have learned, over the years, that the amount of the expression, or allele burden, does correlate with the disease behavior outcome. And then our ability to reverse that. So, a chief decrease of the burden is also relevant to the outcome of the patients. So, developing therapies or even putting these as an endpoint for clinical trials is important for our decision-making and moving towards eradication of the disease.
Then there are additional molecular changes, which include non-drivers, which are additional mutations that we have learned and even implemented in the latest prognostic models, some of them are very unfavorable, such as ASXL1, Ezh2, IDH mutations, certain splicing factors.
And those play additional roles, a lot of it we still do not understand, in how the disease is going to ultimately behave. What is their interplay, and how we can interfere with that?
So, learning about the impact of these mutations and the drivers and the other effects that cause the disease evolution will probably become the landmark of this decade and in facing myeloproliferative neoplasms.
And I’m hoping we will develop medications, or we will be able to focus our efforts and our decision-making based on molecular definition, as it’s currently very broadly seen across all cancers. We call it precision medicine where we really define, “How does this look like,” not how we box it in based on morphology. What is it driving? What is it not responding? And what can we do to improve that?
So, I totally see here a big potent and powerful tool to allow us to make the most individualized and customized decisions for our patients to offer them the best outcomes.
Understanding AML Treatment Categories
Understanding AML Treatment Categories from Patient Empowerment Network on Vimeo.
What are the available classes of therapy for acute myeloid leukemia (AML)? Dr. Jacqueline Garcia reviews AML treatment options, ranging from chemotherapy and stem cell transplant to supportive care.
Dr. Jacqueline Garcia is an oncologist and AML researcher at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. Learn more about Dr. Garcia.
Related Resources:
New and Emerging AML Therapies Being Studied in Clinical Trials |
Transcript:
Katherine Banwell:
In your experience, what does it mean to thrive with AML?
Dr. Jacqueline Garcia:
I think that’s a really great question, and I’m glad you’re asking me now as opposed to a decade ago. In the last several years, we’ve had a tremendous number of drugs that got FDA-approved and a lot of exciting clinical trials that have not only shown efficacy and safety but really some long-term responses. So, we can now focus on not just finding what drug can work, which used to be our problem 10 years ago, since we had very limited therapeutic tools, meaning treatments. We now have several treatments available.
So, when I think of what it means to thrive, it’s identifying the right treatment for each individual patient with acute myeloid leukemia, because what might be recommended for one patient may not be the right for another. And there are many different patient- and disease-related factors that go into that decision-making.
Katherine Banwell:
Can you walk us through the classes of treatment that are considered when choosing an AML treatment approach?
Dr. Jacqueline Garcia:
Yeah. In terms of the different classes of treatments, I would say we think of probably three broad categories. One would be – sorry, four broad categories. One would be intensive chemotherapy. And that involves generally hospitalization. Another would be less intensive therapy. That could involve a mixture of inpatient or outpatient therapy. That could also include targeted therapy. The third would be clinical trials, which can include any of the former options I recommended, but they would be in an experimental study. And the fourth would be focusing solely on supportive care or hospice for patients that are too sick to receive therapy.
Other aspects that are specific, such as pills, versus IV, versus role of transplant, I don’t see it as being separate. You don’t go right to transplant when you have a diagnosis of AML. You have to be in remission. So, transplant, for instance, would come after an intensive therapy or after the less intensive chemotherapy. So, I see that as being the second step once I choose the right treatment option for the patient.
Katherine Banwell:
And when you’re talking about transplant, you’re talking about stem cell transplant, right?
Dr. Jacqueline Garcia:
Yes. Stem cell transplant, bone marrow transplant – they mean the same thing. We recruit stem cells from donors that are related or unrelated, and we mobilize them from bone marrow to blood. And so, we can collect stem cells either from blood or bone marrow at this point. So, that’s exactly right.
Katherine Banwell:
And what about targeted therapy?
Dr. Jacqueline Garcia:
We have targeted therapy available that’s IV or pill form. And so, any one of these options can be considered. But everything is very patient-specific, and I am very happy to tell you some of the categories and nuances of things that I look at, because I don’t usually just offer patients a menu.
I tell them what’s appropriate based on their patient characteristics, meaning what their liver function is, their heart function, their history, medical history, what their labs show. And then, I look at their disease history. We are now in an era where we have options. So, I look to see are there mutations that are targetable. Are there not? Are there markers on the surface of their leukemia cells that suggest that there’s a target for an immunotherapy?
So, we don’t offer classes per se without it being specific. So, I always look to see what are the patient disease-specific characteristics, and then I start the conversation about what the potential options could be and then what I think the best option would be for that particular case.
PODCAST: Thriving With AML | Tips and Support for Navigating Treatment
How can you navigate care and thrive with acute myeloid leukemia (AML)? In this webinar, Dr. Jacqueline Garcia, an AML specialist and researcher, discusses the treatment and management of AML. Dr. Garcia will review factors that impact therapy choices and shares advice and resources for people living with AML.
Dr. Jacqueline Garcia is an oncologist and AML researcher at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. Learn more about Dr. Garcia.
Transcript:
Katherine Banwell:
Hello, and welcome. I’m Katherine Banwell, your host for this webinar. Today’s program is about how to live and thrive with AML. We’re going to discuss how to live well with AML and why you should play an active role in your care. Before we get into the discussion, please remember that this program is not a substitute for seeking medical advice. Please refer to your healthcare team about what might be best for you.
Well, let’s meet our guest today. Joining me is Dr. Jacqueline Garcia. Dr. Garcia, welcome. Would you please introduce yourself?
Dr. Jacqueline Garcia:
Yes. Hi. My name is Jacqueline Garcia. I’m an oncologist at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. I’m a clinical translational investigator. And what this means is I take care of patients with acute and chronic leukemias. I focus mainly on patients with acute myeloid leukemia. The investigator part means, in addition to seeing patients, I spend a lot of time writing, developing, and executing clinical trials in the AML space. We know that there have been so many wonderful therapies that we helped to move froward and bring to the field and so there is more work to be done. So, having active investigations is a key part of this role.
Katherine Banwell:
Excellent. Well, thank you for taking the time out of your schedule to join us today. We really appreciate it. We start all of our webinars in our Thrive Series with the same question. In your experience, what does it mean to thrive with AML?
Dr. Jacqueline Garcia:
I think that’s a really great question and I’m glad you’re asking me now as opposed to a decade ago. In the last several years, we’ve had a tremendous number of drugs that got FDA-approved and a lot of exciting clinical trials that have not only shown efficacy and safety but really some long-term responses. So, we can now focus on not just finding what drug can work, which used to be our problem 10 years ago, since we had very limited therapeutic tools, meaning treatments. We now have several treatments available.
So, when I think of what it means to thrive, it’s identifying the right treatment for each individual patient with acute myeloid leukemia, because what might be recommended for one patient may not be the right for another. And there are many different patient- and disease-related factors that go into that decision-making.
Katherine Banwell:
Thank you for that, Dr. Garcia. It helps guide us as we move into our conversation. Typically, there are a number of team members to care for a patient. Who is part of an AML healthcare team?
Dr. Jacqueline Garcia:
Absolutely. We definitely cannot work on our own. Our team is very large, and it’s because these patients require a lot of support. At a bare minimum, a healthcare team will include at least one physician or an oncologist. The AML healthcare team might also include a second oncologist – that could be a bone marrow transplant doctor.
Other members that are very critical include having a mid-leveler available that’s a physician assistant or a nurse practitioner. Often, an oncologist who runs a busy practice, who takes care of patients that could be very sick, like AML, they work in partnership with often very talented physician assistants and nurse practitioners. I know I do.
In addition to that, I’m at an academic center so I’m super fortunate. I have really amazing and very smart hematology oncology fellows and residents that also follow to learn how to take care of patients. But we also, in the background, that patients don’t see – we have a pharmacist that helps us with making sure that drugs are prescribed correctly. They often call the patients with oral therapies to follow up. We have financial resource teams to help patients, to link them to LLS for support for bills that might come up, or transportation, or linking them up to other services that could help to defray or reduce costs.
So, the healthcare team is quite extensive. But in terms of those that are patient-facing, it’s primarily the MDM that are mid-leveler. Some teams operate also with a nurse or a nurse care coordinator. That’s pretty common, too. And that person helps to not only schedule but also to answer pages or phone calls from patients if the medical team is not doing that.
Katherine Banwell: What about a social worker or psychologist?
Dr. Jacqueline Garcia:
Oh. Yes. Yes. So, absolutely. So, every patient can be offered, if needed, access to an inpatient or outpatient social worker. Often, if my patients are admitted we have them see a social worker because that’s fairly seamless. Otherwise, for outpatient, if we identify any particular needs or there’s an interest, we’ll link them up with a social worker. This is the same that goes for physical therapy, or nutritionists, or those other ancillary services that can be really critical when patients are getting started.
Katherine Banwell:
Yeah. Of course, getting appropriate care and treatment is essential to thriving. Can you walk us through the classes of treatment that are considered when choosing an AML treatment approach?
Dr. Jacqueline Garcia:
Yeah. In terms of the different classes of treatments, I would say we think of probably three broad categories. One would be – sorry, four broad categories. One would be intensive chemotherapy. And that involves generally hospitalization. Another would be less intensive therapy. That could involve a mixture of inpatient or outpatient therapy. That could also include targeted therapy. The third would be clinical trials, which can include any of the former options I recommended, but they would be in an experimental study. And the fourth would be focusing solely on supportive care or hospice for patients that are too sick to receive therapy.
Other aspects that are specific, such as pills, versus IV, versus role of transplant, I don’t see it as being separate. You don’t go right to transplant when you have a diagnosis of AML. You have to be in remission. So, transplant, for instance, would come after an intensive therapy or after the less intensive chemotherapy. So, I see that as being the second step once I choose the right treatment option for the patient.
Katherine Banwell:
And when you’re talking about transplant, you’re talking about stem cell transplant, right?
Dr. Jacqueline Garcia:
Yes. Stem cell transplant, bone marrow transplant – they mean the same thing. We recruit stem cells from donors that are related or unrelated, and we mobilize them from bone marrow to blood. And so, we can collect stem cells either from blood or bone marrow at this point. So, that’s exactly right.
Katherine Banwell:
And what about targeted therapy?
Dr. Jacqueline Garcia:
We have targeted therapy available that’s IV or pill form. And so, any one of these options can be considered. But everything is very patient-specific, and I am very happy to tell you some of the categories and nuances of things that I look at, because I don’t usually just offer patients a menu.
I tell them what’s appropriate based on their patient characteristics, meaning what their liver function is, their heart function, their history, medical history, what their labs show. And then, I look at their disease history. We are now in an era where we have options. So, I look to see are there mutations that are targetable. Are there not? Are there markers on the surface of their leukemia cells that suggest that there’s a target for an immunotherapy?
So, we don’t offer classes per se without it being specific. So, I always look to see what are the patient disease-specific characteristics, and then I start the conversation about what the potential options could be and then what I think the best option would be for that particular case.
Katherine Banwell:
As a researcher, Dr. Garcia, you’re on the frontlines of AML treatment. Are there new and emerging therapies that patients should be aware of?
Dr. Jacqueline Garcia:
Yeah. I think we’re at this really exciting point now where we had for a long time just been giving people standard two agent intensive chemotherapy. We have been studying in Phase II and Phase III settings, and even in Phase I – which means testing safety out for the first time. We’ve been moving a lot of treatments to more mature settings where we’re testing the addition of a third drug. So, for people that are getting intensive chemo, we’re looking at, “Can we add a pill to augment responses deep in them to reduce risk of disease returning?”
For less intensive chemotherapies, one of the most common regimens we now use is something called azacitidine (Vidaza), which is a hypomethylating agent that is given by IV or subcutaneous administration. Plus, a pill called venetoclax (Venclexta).
We helped to get that FDA-approved a couple of years ago. That combination of therapy, we call that a doublet, meaning it’s two drugs – because it’s so well-tolerated and active, we’re now asking the greedy question of, “Well, can we make it more active for patients since we’re seeing how well-tolerated it is?”
So, there have been a lot of therapies that are currently under investigation that are adding a third drug to these less-intensive doublets. So, there’s a lot of therapies under investigation to test, “Can we add an immunotherapy target? Is there another pill that we can add? Is there another targeting mutation to add to the doublet?” So, we’re looking at AML therapies from different angles. We’re looking at adding something to the existing new standard of care – those are these new, so-called, triplets.
We’re looking at still the role of cellular therapy or CAR Ts targeting leukemia cells from an immunotherapy standpoint.
That remains underdeveloped overall, and we have not succeeded as well, like our lymphoid colleagues in the lymphoma and acute lymphoblastic leukemia realm where there are drugs that are active and FDA-approved.
So, we’re still trying to identify the right target. But those are some of the areas that are currently under study.
Katherine Banwell:
You touched on this earlier, Dr. Garcia, but I’d like to get into a bit more detail. With all the treatment options available, how do you decide who gets what? Tell us what is considered when choosing treatment for a patient.
Dr. Jacqueline Garcia:
When I – this is a complicated question, because it’s not like you follow any particular algorithm. But when I meet a patient, I make a decision on what’s important to the patient and what’s their goal. If I know – I need to understand their overall health to get a sense of are there ongoing competing risk factors that are active and more likely to impede with response, ability to deliver chemo, ability to get to transplant, something that tells me that’s not a possibility, or is their age too advanced – meaning greater than 75 – where we know that some of the treatments are not safe to deliver in that setting?
So, I take a look at a patient’s overall health and age to make a decision. I take a look at bone marrow biopsy and lab findings to understand the flavor of their leukemia, from chromosomes to mutations. And because I am familiar with the data to give me a sense of what’s safe, what’s tolerable, and importantly what types of diseases, or subtypes of AML, would respond to one therapy over another, that’s how I formulate a recommendation.
And based on all of that, all together, I’ll talk to them about treating the AML in steps. The first step is getting them into a remission, which can be done regardless of therapy type. That means to get their bone marrow under control, blood counts to recover. The second step, which is a more involved conversation that I often give a little bit of a hint of, but I go into greater detail over time, because we will see each other quite a lot, whether in the hospital or in clinic, is how to keep them in remission.
And that’s where details about things like transplant come into play. I do my best to not overwhelm them, because when a patient hears the word transplant – and that’s often what they hear from family and friends because that’s what you can Google – they don’t know that there are many things, or many weeks of therapy, that have to happen in advance of transplant even being considered or happening. And transplant can’t even happen until someone’s in remission.
But that is always on the forefront of a leukemia doctor’s mind, “Can I bring this patient to a transplantation? How successful will I be and what else do I need to give them to get them there sooner, safer, with a deeper response?” So, that way transplant could be successful. Transplant, by the way, is when we give a patient someone else’s stem cells that match their HLA typing, or their white blood cell signature.
And it helps us to use someone else’s immune system to completely irradicate any microscopic leftover leukemia in a patient. But that is only successful when patients have good disease control or remissions. And that is only also successful if we have a donor for the patient, both of which require at least several weeks to a couple of months of therapy. But that process is always initiated and ongoing in the background. And so, we often do this in piecemeal, because getting a diagnosis is already overwhelming. Learning about treatment is overwhelming.
Learning about the frequency of labs, transfusions, being hospitalized, and then details about what a transplant would entail can be also overwhelming. But a lot of family and friends like to ask, because they feel like that is one way they might be able to help a patient. So, I know that they often eagerly ask the patient, “Well, what about this? How can I help?”
Katherine Banwell:
Right. I can imagine that patient preference is also considered. But what kind of questions should patients ask about their treatment regimen?
Dr. Jacqueline Garcia:
I always tell patients that I care very much about things like travel, hotels, all that jazz. But I always tell them let’s first talk about their health, what treatment I would recommend based on the available options and what their disease would mostly respond to, because I want it to be successful. And I always tell them let’s reserve questions on how it’s going to be done for last. I call that the logistics. I will never bring up or recommend something that could never be possible. But that being said, I try not to let the commute determine the decision.
Whether or not there needs to be a hospitalization versus a hotel stay. I always consider then the background, but that financial decision should not drive the best treatment choice for a patient. Very fortunately, we’re in a country where patients have the ability – often, not always – to seek second opinions or to travel to academic centers.
And because AML is an emergent or life-threatening disease, many insurance providers allow patients to come up to a big center to be treated, which I think is more than appropriate. So, we get into details of logistics last, because that’s the one thing that we can often overcome by providing additional resources and support. In terms of patient preference, if that’s what you mean with that, I would say I leave logistics to last, but we always consider and we do our best to accommodate.
And that might be where we inform them we will look into getting a local partner to help us with additional therapies after the first month or upon discharge. So, it totally depends on the scenario for a patient, whether or not they have a local provider and a local hospital that could accommodate acute leukemia. I always tell patients ideally you don’t want to go to a place that only sees this once per year. You want to go to a place where everyone has seen it multiple times, including the nurses on the floors.
So, that way, when there’s a complication, everyone knows what to do. We don’t want any “surprises” when it’s really just run-of-the-mill standard stuff for us every day. In terms of what patients desire, we always keep that in the conversation of their level of support. Can they swallow pills? Are they able to cope with being in and out of the hospital? All that stuff gets considered, but I think if they hear about the plan, about what’s required, when my expectation would be for a response, when the frequency of trips to a big city would decrease, how I could get a local partner to help with some of the lab or transfusion burden.
Many of those preferences that they thought they had diminished, because they recognize that we found a way to make it work.
Katherine Banwell:
Okay. Well, that’s really good to know. You touched on oral therapies a bit ago, and I know that they’re available for certain patients. Do you have any advice for patients who are in charge now of administering their own therapy?
Dr. Jacqueline Garcia:
Yeah, I think that taking pills in general is hard for anybody, whether they’re naïve to pills. I definitely have patients that have never been on anything, and suddenly they’re on many medicines, to other people that are managing multiple medical conditions and this is yet another burden to add. I would say having an oral regimen is wonderful. It offers a lot of convenience. But we are all very thoughtful, and we all need to be proactive about looking for drug-drug interactions, because often there could be increases in the chemotherapy presence when another drug is on board.
Sometimes, antibiotics are added on but they don’t realize it can add to side effects to chemotherapy. So, I would say number one is always make sure your oncology team is aware of the medications you are on or get recommended to add on in the midst of therapy, so we can make sure there are appropriate dosage estimates or if a particular drug should be avoided, then we can do that.
I would say, too, having oral therapies is great, but there’s also financial toxicity that comes with it. Sometimes copays can get hefty. So, just because it’s oral, it’s not always convenient financially. Also, when things are oral it can add to more GI or mal gut toxicity. So, we’re always keeping in mind how many oral therapies, what drugs they are, so we don’t increase nausea and diarrhea, which can happen frequently when you’re requiring the GI tract to absorb the therapies that are necessary to eliminate the disease.
So, all these things are under consideration. But to help people that are on oral therapies, it’s helpful to let your providers know if you’re noticing a pattern of nausea, so we can premedicate, have you take a nausea medicine before you take the chemo. You could also put a timer on your phone if you’re not used to taking medicines to serve as a reminder. You could create little calendars or check off on a paper calendar when you’ve taken a drug if you need help with reminding.
So, there are little tricks like that. I always consider using a pillbox if you don’t have other pills to mix in and if you’re the only one touching it. I don’t want anybody to be exposed to therapies that they shouldn’t be otherwise.
Katherine Banwell:
That’s good advice. Thank you. If a patient is feeling uncomfortable with the direction of their treatment plan or their care, should they consider a second opinion or even consulting a specialist?
Dr. Jacqueline Garcia:
Oh, 100 percent. I would say – I think that I’m spoiled. I’m a leukemia specialist, so they’re already seeing a specialist when a patient sees me. I don’t take care of any other cancers. But, I would say, for anyone seeing any oncologist in general, I would – number one, it doesn’t do the medical team any favors if you withhold any feelings of how the treatment’s going. Meaning, if you feel uncomfortable or that you’re having symptoms or people are taking too long to get back to you based on your experience.
I would just make sure you do your best to at least let them know so that they have the ability to adjust or accommodate whatever need you might have that might be different than what they’re used to, because every patient’s different. Some people have a really great support system. Or they have a little bit of experience of being a patient. Different coping mechanisms. Everyone’s different. There’s no right or wrong. But I would just make sure that it’s clear with your existing team because they’re actively seeing you. Give them a chance to make the experience better.
I would for sure seek a second opinion. Don’t delay – I will just put this disclaimer. I would not delay treatment for an AML if your current doctor is giving you a good plan and you feel confident that they have looked into whether or not you need to go to a bigger leukemia center and all that other stuff. But if you feel like they are giving you a good plan, don’t delay your therapy in the beginning, because you might get sick.
If, however, there is demonstration of safety and time to see someone within a short timeframe for a second opinion at the time of diagnosis before treatment started, then that’s okay. But wouldn’t wait a few months to go looking around, because that could put your health at risk. Once you’re on treatment, seeking a second opinion, if you’re dissatisfied with your ongoing team, it’s fine. I always want patients to feel comfortable with their treatment plan.
But I would recognize that you want to make it clear to your current team that they’re still helping you and responsible for your treatment. Because if you, for instance, started seeing multiple doctors and they won’t know who should be helping to follow up on certain things, who’s going to be scheduling the next round of therapy. And that ends up putting more ownership unnecessarily onto the patient where they might not have needed to have all that extra responsibility. So, I would just say just make sure that’s clear. Yeah.
Katherine Banwell:
Dr. Garcia, you mentioned earlier the fact that some therapies can cause a lot of side effects, like nausea. And certainly, speaking up and telling your healthcare team how you’re feeling and what some of the symptoms and side effects are, that’s really essential. What is the impetus for someone to consider changing treatment if something is just absolutely not agreeing with them?
Dr. Jacqueline Garcia:
So, there are many reasons to change a treatment. One is a patient doesn’t tolerate it. It depends on what the issue is. Is it something that’s serious, like a liver or enzyme abnormality that is very abnormal, or a new cardiac problem where it would warrant a change or a dose reduction? That makes sense. There is definitely – often, there’s a lot of guidance in the package inserts or within a clinical trial and how to manage that. But if patient has some intolerabilities that could be overcome with standard supportive care methods, I would make sure we’ve done that.
So, I would make sure you give you medical team the chance to fix any nausea. We have so many great antinausea drugs. I would want to make sure – or if constipation or diarrhea. It’s often a GI issue that patients get really bothered by.
I would try to delineate whether or not the side effect was really from the chemo or is from the leukemia that is not yet under control. Or is it another medical condition or a drug-drug interaction that was missed. So, I would do my best to make sure there wasn’t something that was fixable or something else that should be addressed. We otherwise would recommend changing therapy for an extreme intolerability if there was another equivalent better option. And if someone’s disease does not respond to treatment, then we would consider another therapy, too.
Katherine Banwell:
Dr. Garcia, I want to make sure that we get to some of the audience questions that were sent to us prior to this program. Let’s start with this one.
Jerry had this question. “How long can patients stay on azacitidine and venetoclax before relapse or toxicities force them to abandon treatment?”
Dr. Jacqueline Garcia:
So, this is a good question. I would say azacitidine and venetoclax just got FDA-approved just shy of five years now, and it’s totally changed our treatment paradigm in many great ways. It was initially approved for patients that could not get intensive chemotherapies or were above 75. We call these our older patients, our more vulnerable.
And we demonstrated and compared to azacitidine alone. It was given with placebo. We saw that the combination of azacitidine and venetoclax not only was safe, well-tolerated, it led to two-and-a-half times higher complete remission rates and impressively longer survival. That’s all we care about, patients are living longer. So, one of the things that we are appreciating in 2023 now, now that we have more patients on azacitidine and venetoclax, is that we have many patients that are long-term responders.
So, in the original clinical trial we’ve been reported – and we just submitted the update for the long-term follow-up that we presented at the American Society of Hematology meeting in 2022, in December.
We presented the long-term follow-up data that shows that responses can be durable and even as long as two years or three years in some patients. The average amount of time the patients are on therapy is somewhere between one-and-a-half to two years. But not every patient performs like an average patient.
We have some that respond for less time. We have some that respond for a longer time. So, I definitely have a few patients that have been on combination therapy, and we’ve gone to year three, then four, and two that got to year five. And that was using the original indication of older the 75, no intensive chemotherapy. Most of those patients in the original trial and led to the approval were not transplant candidates. But once those drugs got approved, more patients that were older started getting this therapy.
And so, the durability of this treatment might be longer for people that don’t have competing health problems and for specific mutation subtypes. There are a couple of mutation subtypes that include IDH2 and NPM1, where we’ve seen some extreme long-term responders.
And then, there are others that are much shorter. So, I would say it’s very individual. In terms of toxicities in general, the regimens very well-tolerated. And if it’s not, often it’s because there should be supportive care, prophylaxis, and adjustments to the dosing strategy, which has been well-published. Sometimes, if you have a treating oncologist that is less familiar, they won’t know the nuances of how to adjust the doses, so I would ask your local oncologist to reach out to anybody that was part of the original trials. Often, a lot of us are very responsive to helping out our colleagues to help patients to stay on treatment.
But at the end of the day, if a patient loses response or has a bad toxicity that makes it very difficult, we have to move on to another therapy.
Katherine Banwell:
Of course. Carrie sent in this question. “What percent of patients relapse and what percent of patients relapse more than once?”
Dr. Jacqueline Garcia:
Okay. So, this is a question that I can certainly answer, but I would say it depends on the context. So, if I was taking – any time a patient asks me that, I always ask them what they want to know and what they don’t want to hear, because sometimes hearing numbers can be really daunting to patients overall.
So, a very large number of patients with leukemia can go on to relapse, which is why, if you’re on a treatment like azacitidine and venetoclax, we continue it every month as long as we can with dose reductions to help with tolerability.
And that’s why, if you got that regimen or intensive chemo or another clinical trial and you get into remission, we ask the question of can we transplant this patient to do our best to cure them long-term to avoid and reduce the chance of a relapse. So, even with transplant, which remains our gold standard for long-term curability – it’s the only treatment we have that has a guaranteed track record of cure – not every patient that goes to transplant will remain in remission.
If I were to be asked, “Well, how many relapse,” I would say it depends. I would say if I took the average patient, maybe 40 to 50 percent will relapse. But if you ask me for certain mutation types it could be 90 percent are cured or only 20 percent are cured. So, it’s very individual. It depends on age. It depends on mutations. It depends on the level of response they had before they go to transplant.
So, I would say even though the word relapse is very scary or disease coming back is definitely a scary thing, there are a lot of people, including me, that are working on ways to reduce risk of relapse, improve how we transplant, improve the treatments around and after transplant, and improving frontline and relapse therapies.
I think you had a second question of what happens if you relapse once and then what about if relapse happens again? I would say that getting into remission the first time is always the easiest. The way I always think about it is, you kill off all the bad cells that are the easiest to die the first time around with chemotherapy. Anything that’s left behind are often the resistant types. And so, getting into a second remission or responding the second time around with treatment is doable, but it’s much harder.
So, I would say the majority of patients that relapse the first time will relapse the second time, unless we can successfully bridge them to a transplantation.
Katherine Banwell:
Yeah. Dr. Garcia, as we close out this conversation, I wanted to get your thoughts on where we stand with progress in helping people live longer and thrive with AML. What would you like to leave the audience with?
Dr. Jacqueline Garcia:
I think that this is – I feel very lucky with when I entered the field, that in this last decade, as I’ve developed – my time at Dana-Farber, for instance – I’ve seen that there have been so many drugs that we helped to get approved that are now in the hands of local oncologists and other academic oncologists, suggesting that the clinical trials are a gateway to improving treatments and offering new options.
We’ve gotten better at understanding what mutations and chromosomes means and personalizing medicines, and that has allowed us to develop smarter and better clinical trials, which we hope we will get to keep approving and making more available to patients. So, I think that this is a really good time for AML, meaning we have more than one option, that is for sure. We can now think about what the patient wants, what the patient, and what their patient disease has in order to make a decision. We weren’t able to do that before.
So, we can really involve patients so they understand why we would recommend one option versus another. And we are still not done with investigation, even though many drugs got approved in the last five years. There’s a lot more progress to be made, especially in areas that we touched upon, from approving getting patients to transplant, reducing relapse risk, keeping people in remission. Those are all things that I’m personally working on in the clinical trial space and things a lot of my colleagues in the world are working on, too.
It’s very important to all of us. So, I would say be hopeful that we are not done. There’s a lot of great options out there. We really can personalize. There are a lot of options out there, but everyone will get offered their best therapy and the first-line therapy is the most important. And I am very hopeful that we will keep getting better at prolonging remissions and durability of those responses.
Katherine Banwell:
Dr. Garcia, thank you so much for taking the time to join us today. It’s been a pleasure.
Dr. Jacqueline Garcia:
Thank you.
Katherine Banwell:
And thank you to all of our collaborators. To learn more about AML and to access tools to help you become a proactive patient, visit powerfulpatients.org. I’m Katherine Banwell. Thanks for being with us.
Thriving With AML | Tips and Support for Navigating Treatment
Thriving With AML | Tips and Support for Navigating Treatment from Patient Empowerment Network on Vimeo.
How can you navigate care and thrive with acute myeloid leukemia (AML)? In this webinar, Dr. Jacqueline Garcia, an AML specialist and researcher, discusses the treatment and management of AML. Dr. Garcia will review factors that impact therapy choices and shares advice and resources for people living with AML.
Dr. Jacqueline Garcia is an oncologist and AML researcher at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. Learn more about Dr. Garcia.
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Transcript:
Katherine Banwell:
Hello, and welcome. I’m Katherine Banwell, your host for this webinar. Today’s program is about how to live and thrive with AML. We’re going to discuss how to live well with AML and why you should play an active role in your care. Before we get into the discussion, please remember that this program is not a substitute for seeking medical advice. Please refer to your healthcare team about what might be best for you.
Well, let’s meet our guest today. Joining me is Dr. Jacqueline Garcia. Dr. Garcia, welcome. Would you please introduce yourself?
Dr. Jacqueline Garcia:
Yes. Hi. My name is Jacqueline Garcia. I’m an oncologist at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. I’m a clinical translational investigator. And what this means is I take care of patients with acute and chronic leukemias. I focus mainly on patients with acute myeloid leukemia. The investigator part means, in addition to seeing patients, I spend a lot of time writing, developing, and executing clinical trials in the AML space. We know that there have been so many wonderful therapies that we helped to move froward and bring to the field and so there is more work to be done. So, having active investigations is a key part of this role.
Katherine Banwell:
Excellent. Well, thank you for taking the time out of your schedule to join us today. We really appreciate it. We start all of our webinars in our Thrive Series with the same question. In your experience, what does it mean to thrive with AML?
Dr. Jacqueline Garcia:
I think that’s a really great question and I’m glad you’re asking me now as opposed to a decade ago. In the last several years, we’ve had a tremendous number of drugs that got FDA-approved and a lot of exciting clinical trials that have not only shown efficacy and safety but really some long-term responses. So, we can now focus on not just finding what drug can work, which used to be our problem 10 years ago, since we had very limited therapeutic tools, meaning treatments. We now have several treatments available.
So, when I think of what it means to thrive, it’s identifying the right treatment for each individual patient with acute myeloid leukemia, because what might be recommended for one patient may not be the right for another. And there are many different patient- and disease-related factors that go into that decision-making.
Katherine Banwell:
Thank you for that, Dr. Garcia. It helps guide us as we move into our conversation. Typically, there are a number of team members to care for a patient. Who is part of an AML healthcare team?
Dr. Jacqueline Garcia:
Absolutely. We definitely cannot work on our own. Our team is very large, and it’s because these patients require a lot of support. At a bare minimum, a healthcare team will include at least one physician or an oncologist. The AML healthcare team might also include a second oncologist – that could be a bone marrow transplant doctor.
Other members that are very critical include having a mid-leveler available that’s a physician assistant or a nurse practitioner. Often, an oncologist who runs a busy practice, who takes care of patients that could be very sick, like AML, they work in partnership with often very talented physician assistants and nurse practitioners. I know I do.
In addition to that, I’m at an academic center so I’m super fortunate. I have really amazing and very smart hematology oncology fellows and residents that also follow to learn how to take care of patients. But we also, in the background, that patients don’t see – we have a pharmacist that helps us with making sure that drugs are prescribed correctly. They often call the patients with oral therapies to follow up. We have financial resource teams to help patients, to link them to LLS for support for bills that might come up, or transportation, or linking them up to other services that could help to defray or reduce costs.
So, the healthcare team is quite extensive. But in terms of those that are patient-facing, it’s primarily the MDM that are mid-leveler. Some teams operate also with a nurse or a nurse care coordinator. That’s pretty common, too. And that person helps to not only schedule but also to answer pages or phone calls from patients if the medical team is not doing that.
Katherine Banwell: What about a social worker or psychologist?
Dr. Jacqueline Garcia:
Oh. Yes. Yes. So, absolutely. So, every patient can be offered, if needed, access to an inpatient or outpatient social worker. Often, if my patients are admitted we have them see a social worker because that’s fairly seamless. Otherwise, for outpatient, if we identify any particular needs or there’s an interest, we’ll link them up with a social worker. This is the same that goes for physical therapy, or nutritionists, or those other ancillary services that can be really critical when patients are getting started.
Katherine Banwell:
Yeah. Of course, getting appropriate care and treatment is essential to thriving. Can you walk us through the classes of treatment that are considered when choosing an AML treatment approach?
Dr. Jacqueline Garcia:
Yeah. In terms of the different classes of treatments, I would say we think of probably three broad categories. One would be – sorry, four broad categories. One would be intensive chemotherapy. And that involves generally hospitalization. Another would be less intensive therapy. That could involve a mixture of inpatient or outpatient therapy. That could also include targeted therapy. The third would be clinical trials, which can include any of the former options I recommended, but they would be in an experimental study. And the fourth would be focusing solely on supportive care or hospice for patients that are too sick to receive therapy.
Other aspects that are specific, such as pills, versus IV, versus role of transplant, I don’t see it as being separate. You don’t go right to transplant when you have a diagnosis of AML. You have to be in remission. So, transplant, for instance, would come after an intensive therapy or after the less intensive chemotherapy. So, I see that as being the second step once I choose the right treatment option for the patient.
Katherine Banwell:
And when you’re talking about transplant, you’re talking about stem cell transplant, right?
Dr. Jacqueline Garcia:
Yes. Stem cell transplant, bone marrow transplant – they mean the same thing. We recruit stem cells from donors that are related or unrelated, and we mobilize them from bone marrow to blood. And so, we can collect stem cells either from blood or bone marrow at this point. So, that’s exactly right.
Katherine Banwell:
And what about targeted therapy?
Dr. Jacqueline Garcia:
We have targeted therapy available that’s IV or pill form. And so, any one of these options can be considered. But everything is very patient-specific, and I am very happy to tell you some of the categories and nuances of things that I look at, because I don’t usually just offer patients a menu.
I tell them what’s appropriate based on their patient characteristics, meaning what their liver function is, their heart function, their history, medical history, what their labs show. And then, I look at their disease history. We are now in an era where we have options. So, I look to see are there mutations that are targetable. Are there not? Are there markers on the surface of their leukemia cells that suggest that there’s a target for an immunotherapy?
So, we don’t offer classes per se without it being specific. So, I always look to see what are the patient disease-specific characteristics, and then I start the conversation about what the potential options could be and then what I think the best option would be for that particular case.
Katherine Banwell:
As a researcher, Dr. Garcia, you’re on the frontlines of AML treatment. Are there new and emerging therapies that patients should be aware of?
Dr. Jacqueline Garcia:
Yeah. I think we’re at this really exciting point now where we had for a long time just been giving people standard two agent intensive chemotherapy. We have been studying in Phase II and Phase III settings, and even in Phase I – which means testing safety out for the first time. We’ve been moving a lot of treatments to more mature settings where we’re testing the addition of a third drug. So, for people that are getting intensive chemo, we’re looking at, “Can we add a pill to augment responses deep in them to reduce risk of disease returning?”
For less intensive chemotherapies, one of the most common regimens we now use is something called azacitidine (Vidaza), which is a hypomethylating agent that is given by IV or subcutaneous administration. Plus, a pill called venetoclax (Venclexta).
We helped to get that FDA-approved a couple of years ago. That combination of therapy, we call that a doublet, meaning it’s two drugs – because it’s so well-tolerated and active, we’re now asking the greedy question of, “Well, can we make it more active for patients since we’re seeing how well-tolerated it is?”
So, there have been a lot of therapies that are currently under investigation that are adding a third drug to these less-intensive doublets. So, there’s a lot of therapies under investigation to test, “Can we add an immunotherapy target? Is there another pill that we can add? Is there another targeting mutation to add to the doublet?” So, we’re looking at AML therapies from different angles. We’re looking at adding something to the existing new standard of care – those are these new, so-called, triplets.
We’re looking at still the role of cellular therapy or CAR Ts targeting leukemia cells from an immunotherapy standpoint.
That remains underdeveloped overall, and we have not succeeded as well, like our lymphoid colleagues in the lymphoma and acute lymphoblastic leukemia realm where there are drugs that are active and FDA-approved.
So, we’re still trying to identify the right target. But those are some of the areas that are currently under study.
Katherine Banwell:
You touched on this earlier, Dr. Garcia, but I’d like to get into a bit more detail. With all the treatment options available, how do you decide who gets what? Tell us what is considered when choosing treatment for a patient.
Dr. Jacqueline Garcia:
When I – this is a complicated question, because it’s not like you follow any particular algorithm. But when I meet a patient, I make a decision on what’s important to the patient and what’s their goal. If I know – I need to understand their overall health to get a sense of are there ongoing competing risk factors that are active and more likely to impede with response, ability to deliver chemo, ability to get to transplant, something that tells me that’s not a possibility, or is their age too advanced – meaning greater than 75 – where we know that some of the treatments are not safe to deliver in that setting?
So, I take a look at a patient’s overall health and age to make a decision. I take a look at bone marrow biopsy and lab findings to understand the flavor of their leukemia, from chromosomes to mutations. And because I am familiar with the data to give me a sense of what’s safe, what’s tolerable, and importantly what types of diseases, or subtypes of AML, would respond to one therapy over another, that’s how I formulate a recommendation.
And based on all of that, all together, I’ll talk to them about treating the AML in steps. The first step is getting them into a remission, which can be done regardless of therapy type. That means to get their bone marrow under control, blood counts to recover. The second step, which is a more involved conversation that I often give a little bit of a hint of, but I go into greater detail over time, because we will see each other quite a lot, whether in the hospital or in clinic, is how to keep them in remission.
And that’s where details about things like transplant come into play. I do my best to not overwhelm them, because when a patient hears the word transplant – and that’s often what they hear from family and friends because that’s what you can Google – they don’t know that there are many things, or many weeks of therapy, that have to happen in advance of transplant even being considered or happening. And transplant can’t even happen until someone’s in remission.
But that is always on the forefront of a leukemia doctor’s mind, “Can I bring this patient to a transplantation? How successful will I be and what else do I need to give them to get them there sooner, safer, with a deeper response?” So, that way transplant could be successful. Transplant, by the way, is when we give a patient someone else’s stem cells that match their HLA typing, or their white blood cell signature.
And it helps us to use someone else’s immune system to completely irradicate any microscopic leftover leukemia in a patient. But that is only successful when patients have good disease control or remissions. And that is only also successful if we have a donor for the patient, both of which require at least several weeks to a couple of months of therapy. But that process is always initiated and ongoing in the background. And so, we often do this in piecemeal, because getting a diagnosis is already overwhelming. Learning about treatment is overwhelming.
Learning about the frequency of labs, transfusions, being hospitalized, and then details about what a transplant would entail can be also overwhelming. But a lot of family and friends like to ask, because they feel like that is one way they might be able to help a patient. So, I know that they often eagerly ask the patient, “Well, what about this? How can I help?”
Katherine Banwell:
Right. I can imagine that patient preference is also considered. But what kind of questions should patients ask about their treatment regimen?
Dr. Jacqueline Garcia:
I always tell patients that I care very much about things like travel, hotels, all that jazz. But I always tell them let’s first talk about their health, what treatment I would recommend based on the available options and what their disease would mostly respond to, because I want it to be successful. And I always tell them let’s reserve questions on how it’s going to be done for last. I call that the logistics. I will never bring up or recommend something that could never be possible. But that being said, I try not to let the commute determine the decision.
Whether or not there needs to be a hospitalization versus a hotel stay. I always consider then the background, but that financial decision should not drive the best treatment choice for a patient. Very fortunately, we’re in a country where patients have the ability – often, not always – to seek second opinions or to travel to academic centers.
And because AML is an emergent or life-threatening disease, many insurance providers allow patients to come up to a big center to be treated, which I think is more than appropriate. So, we get into details of logistics last, because that’s the one thing that we can often overcome by providing additional resources and support. In terms of patient preference, if that’s what you mean with that, I would say I leave logistics to last, but we always consider and we do our best to accommodate.
And that might be where we inform them we will look into getting a local partner to help us with additional therapies after the first month or upon discharge. So, it totally depends on the scenario for a patient, whether or not they have a local provider and a local hospital that could accommodate acute leukemia. I always tell patients ideally you don’t want to go to a place that only sees this once per year. You want to go to a place where everyone has seen it multiple times, including the nurses on the floors.
So, that way, when there’s a complication, everyone knows what to do. We don’t want any “surprises” when it’s really just run-of-the-mill standard stuff for us every day. In terms of what patients desire, we always keep that in the conversation of their level of support. Can they swallow pills? Are they able to cope with being in and out of the hospital? All that stuff gets considered, but I think if they hear about the plan, about what’s required, when my expectation would be for a response, when the frequency of trips to a big city would decrease, how I could get a local partner to help with some of the lab or transfusion burden.
Many of those preferences that they thought they had diminished, because they recognize that we found a way to make it work.
Katherine Banwell:
Okay. Well, that’s really good to know. You touched on oral therapies a bit ago, and I know that they’re available for certain patients. Do you have any advice for patients who are in charge now of administering their own therapy?
Dr. Jacqueline Garcia:
Yeah, I think that taking pills in general is hard for anybody, whether they’re naïve to pills. I definitely have patients that have never been on anything, and suddenly they’re on many medicines, to other people that are managing multiple medical conditions and this is yet another burden to add. I would say having an oral regimen is wonderful. It offers a lot of convenience. But we are all very thoughtful, and we all need to be proactive about looking for drug-drug interactions, because often there could be increases in the chemotherapy presence when another drug is on board.
Sometimes, antibiotics are added on but they don’t realize it can add to side effects to chemotherapy. So, I would say number one is always make sure your oncology team is aware of the medications you are on or get recommended to add on in the midst of therapy, so we can make sure there are appropriate dosage estimates or if a particular drug should be avoided, then we can do that.
I would say, too, having oral therapies is great, but there’s also financial toxicity that comes with it. Sometimes copays can get hefty. So, just because it’s oral, it’s not always convenient financially. Also, when things are oral it can add to more GI or mal gut toxicity. So, we’re always keeping in mind how many oral therapies, what drugs they are, so we don’t increase nausea and diarrhea, which can happen frequently when you’re requiring the GI tract to absorb the therapies that are necessary to eliminate the disease.
So, all these things are under consideration. But to help people that are on oral therapies, it’s helpful to let your providers know if you’re noticing a pattern of nausea, so we can premedicate, have you take a nausea medicine before you take the chemo. You could also put a timer on your phone if you’re not used to taking medicines to serve as a reminder. You could create little calendars or check off on a paper calendar when you’ve taken a drug if you need help with reminding.
So, there are little tricks like that. I always consider using a pillbox if you don’t have other pills to mix in and if you’re the only one touching it. I don’t want anybody to be exposed to therapies that they shouldn’t be otherwise.
Katherine Banwell:
That’s good advice. Thank you. If a patient is feeling uncomfortable with the direction of their treatment plan or their care, should they consider a second opinion or even consulting a specialist?
Dr. Jacqueline Garcia:
Oh, 100 percent. I would say – I think that I’m spoiled. I’m a leukemia specialist, so they’re already seeing a specialist when a patient sees me. I don’t take care of any other cancers. But, I would say, for anyone seeing any oncologist in general, I would – number one, it doesn’t do the medical team any favors if you withhold any feelings of how the treatment’s going. Meaning, if you feel uncomfortable or that you’re having symptoms or people are taking too long to get back to you based on your experience.
I would just make sure you do your best to at least let them know so that they have the ability to adjust or accommodate whatever need you might have that might be different than what they’re used to, because every patient’s different. Some people have a really great support system. Or they have a little bit of experience of being a patient. Different coping mechanisms. Everyone’s different. There’s no right or wrong. But I would just make sure that it’s clear with your existing team because they’re actively seeing you. Give them a chance to make the experience better.
I would for sure seek a second opinion. Don’t delay – I will just put this disclaimer. I would not delay treatment for an AML if your current doctor is giving you a good plan and you feel confident that they have looked into whether or not you need to go to a bigger leukemia center and all that other stuff. But if you feel like they are giving you a good plan, don’t delay your therapy in the beginning, because you might get sick.
If, however, there is demonstration of safety and time to see someone within a short timeframe for a second opinion at the time of diagnosis before treatment started, then that’s okay. But wouldn’t wait a few months to go looking around, because that could put your health at risk. Once you’re on treatment, seeking a second opinion, if you’re dissatisfied with your ongoing team, it’s fine. I always want patients to feel comfortable with their treatment plan.
But I would recognize that you want to make it clear to your current team that they’re still helping you and responsible for your treatment. Because if you, for instance, started seeing multiple doctors and they won’t know who should be helping to follow up on certain things, who’s going to be scheduling the next round of therapy. And that ends up putting more ownership unnecessarily onto the patient where they might not have needed to have all that extra responsibility. So, I would just say just make sure that’s clear. Yeah.
Katherine Banwell:
Dr. Garcia, you mentioned earlier the fact that some therapies can cause a lot of side effects, like nausea. And certainly, speaking up and telling your healthcare team how you’re feeling and what some of the symptoms and side effects are, that’s really essential. What is the impetus for someone to consider changing treatment if something is just absolutely not agreeing with them?
Dr. Jacqueline Garcia:
So, there are many reasons to change a treatment. One is a patient doesn’t tolerate it. It depends on what the issue is. Is it something that’s serious, like a liver or enzyme abnormality that is very abnormal, or a new cardiac problem where it would warrant a change or a dose reduction? That makes sense. There is definitely – often, there’s a lot of guidance in the package inserts or within a clinical trial and how to manage that. But if patient has some intolerabilities that could be overcome with standard supportive care methods, I would make sure we’ve done that.
So, I would make sure you give you medical team the chance to fix any nausea. We have so many great antinausea drugs. I would want to make sure – or if constipation or diarrhea. It’s often a GI issue that patients get really bothered by.
I would try to delineate whether or not the side effect was really from the chemo or is from the leukemia that is not yet under control. Or is it another medical condition or a drug-drug interaction that was missed. So, I would do my best to make sure there wasn’t something that was fixable or something else that should be addressed. We otherwise would recommend changing therapy for an extreme intolerability if there was another equivalent better option. And if someone’s disease does not respond to treatment, then we would consider another therapy, too.
Katherine Banwell:
Dr. Garcia, I want to make sure that we get to some of the audience questions that were sent to us prior to this program. Let’s start with this one.
Jerry had this question. “How long can patients stay on azacitidine and venetoclax before relapse or toxicities force them to abandon treatment?”
Dr. Jacqueline Garcia:
So, this is a good question. I would say azacitidine and venetoclax just got FDA-approved just shy of five years now, and it’s totally changed our treatment paradigm in many great ways. It was initially approved for patients that could not get intensive chemotherapies or were above 75. We call these our older patients, our more vulnerable.
And we demonstrated and compared to azacitidine alone. It was given with placebo. We saw that the combination of azacitidine and venetoclax not only was safe, well-tolerated, it led to two-and-a-half times higher complete remission rates and impressively longer survival. That’s all we care about, patients are living longer. So, one of the things that we are appreciating in 2023 now, now that we have more patients on azacitidine and venetoclax, is that we have many patients that are long-term responders.
So, in the original clinical trial we’ve been reported – and we just submitted the update for the long-term follow-up that we presented at the American Society of Hematology meeting in 2022, in December.
We presented the long-term follow-up data that shows that responses can be durable and even as long as two years or three years in some patients. The average amount of time the patients are on therapy is somewhere between one-and-a-half to two years. But not every patient performs like an average patient.
We have some that respond for less time. We have some that respond for a longer time. So, I definitely have a few patients that have been on combination therapy, and we’ve gone to year three, then four, and two that got to year five. And that was using the original indication of older the 75, no intensive chemotherapy. Most of those patients in the original trial and led to the approval were not transplant candidates. But once those drugs got approved, more patients that were older started getting this therapy.
And so, the durability of this treatment might be longer for people that don’t have competing health problems and for specific mutation subtypes. There are a couple of mutation subtypes that include IDH2 and NPM1, where we’ve seen some extreme long-term responders.
And then, there are others that are much shorter. So, I would say it’s very individual. In terms of toxicities in general, the regimens very well-tolerated. And if it’s not, often it’s because there should be supportive care, prophylaxis, and adjustments to the dosing strategy, which has been well-published. Sometimes, if you have a treating oncologist that is less familiar, they won’t know the nuances of how to adjust the doses, so I would ask your local oncologist to reach out to anybody that was part of the original trials. Often, a lot of us are very responsive to helping out our colleagues to help patients to stay on treatment.
But at the end of the day, if a patient loses response or has a bad toxicity that makes it very difficult, we have to move on to another therapy.
Katherine Banwell:
Of course. Carrie sent in this question. “What percent of patients relapse and what percent of patients relapse more than once?”
Dr. Jacqueline Garcia:
Okay. So, this is a question that I can certainly answer, but I would say it depends on the context. So, if I was taking – any time a patient asks me that, I always ask them what they want to know and what they don’t want to hear, because sometimes hearing numbers can be really daunting to patients overall.
So, a very large number of patients with leukemia can go on to relapse, which is why, if you’re on a treatment like azacitidine and venetoclax, we continue it every month as long as we can with dose reductions to help with tolerability.
And that’s why, if you got that regimen or intensive chemo or another clinical trial and you get into remission, we ask the question of can we transplant this patient to do our best to cure them long-term to avoid and reduce the chance of a relapse. So, even with transplant, which remains our gold standard for long-term curability – it’s the only treatment we have that has a guaranteed track record of cure – not every patient that goes to transplant will remain in remission.
If I were to be asked, “Well, how many relapse,” I would say it depends. I would say if I took the average patient, maybe 40 to 50 percent will relapse. But if you ask me for certain mutation types it could be 90 percent are cured or only 20 percent are cured. So, it’s very individual. It depends on age. It depends on mutations. It depends on the level of response they had before they go to transplant.
So, I would say even though the word relapse is very scary or disease coming back is definitely a scary thing, there are a lot of people, including me, that are working on ways to reduce risk of relapse, improve how we transplant, improve the treatments around and after transplant, and improving frontline and relapse therapies.
I think you had a second question of what happens if you relapse once and then what about if relapse happens again? I would say that getting into remission the first time is always the easiest. The way I always think about it is, you kill off all the bad cells that are the easiest to die the first time around with chemotherapy. Anything that’s left behind are often the resistant types. And so, getting into a second remission or responding the second time around with treatment is doable, but it’s much harder.
So, I would say the majority of patients that relapse the first time will relapse the second time, unless we can successfully bridge them to a transplantation.
Katherine Banwell:
Yeah. Dr. Garcia, as we close out this conversation, I wanted to get your thoughts on where we stand with progress in helping people live longer and thrive with AML. What would you like to leave the audience with?
Dr. Jacqueline Garcia:
I think that this is – I feel very lucky with when I entered the field, that in this last decade, as I’ve developed – my time at Dana-Farber, for instance – I’ve seen that there have been so many drugs that we helped to get approved that are now in the hands of local oncologists and other academic oncologists, suggesting that the clinical trials are a gateway to improving treatments and offering new options.
We’ve gotten better at understanding what mutations and chromosomes means and personalizing medicines, and that has allowed us to develop smarter and better clinical trials, which we hope we will get to keep approving and making more available to patients. So, I think that this is a really good time for AML, meaning we have more than one option, that is for sure. We can now think about what the patient wants, what the patient, and what their patient disease has in order to make a decision. We weren’t able to do that before.
So, we can really involve patients so they understand why we would recommend one option versus another. And we are still not done with investigation, even though many drugs got approved in the last five years. There’s a lot more progress to be made, especially in areas that we touched upon, from approving getting patients to transplant, reducing relapse risk, keeping people in remission. Those are all things that I’m personally working on in the clinical trial space and things a lot of my colleagues in the world are working on, too.
It’s very important to all of us. So, I would say be hopeful that we are not done. There’s a lot of great options out there. We really can personalize. There are a lot of options out there, but everyone will get offered their best therapy and the first-line therapy is the most important. And I am very hopeful that we will keep getting better at prolonging remissions and durability of those responses.
Katherine Banwell:
Dr. Garcia, thank you so much for taking the time to join us today. It’s been a pleasure.
Dr. Jacqueline Garcia:
Thank you.
Katherine Banwell:
And thank you to all of our collaborators. To learn more about AML and to access tools to help you become a proactive patient, visit powerfulpatients.org. I’m Katherine Banwell. Thanks for being with us.
Expert Advice for Navigating AML Treatment and Care Decisions
Expert Advice for Navigating AML Treatment and Care Decisions from Patient Empowerment Network on Vimeo.
AML expert Dr. Ann-Kathrin Eisfeld reviews the importance of essential testing and explains how the results may impact the care and treatment of patients with AML. Dr. Eisfeld also shares updates on new and developing AML research.
Dr. Ann-Kathrin Eisfeld is Director of the Clara D. Bloomfield Center for Leukemia Outcomes Research at The Ohio State University and a member of the Leukemia Research Program at the OSUCCC – James. Learn more about Dr. Eisfeld.
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Transcript:
Katherine Banwell:
Hello and welcome. I’m Katherine Banwell, your host for today’s webinar. Today’s program is a part of our Insist series. We’ll discuss how to access the most personalized AML therapy for your individual disease and why it’s vital to insist on key testing. Before we meet our guest, let’s review a few important details
The reminder email you received about this program contains a link to a program resource guide. If you haven’t already, click that link to access information to follow along during the webinar. Before we get into the discussion, please remember that this program is not a substitute for seeking medical advice. Please refer to your healthcare team about what might be best for you. Well, let’s meet our guest today. Joining me is Dr. Ann-Kathrin Eisfeld. Dr. Eisfeld, welcome. Would you please introduce yourself?
Dr. Eisfeld:
Hi, thank you so much, Kathrine. Yes. My name is Ann-Kathrin Eisfeld. I’m currently an assistant professor and hematologist at the Ohio State University.
And I’m also serving as the director of the Clara D. Bloomfield Center for leukemia outcomes research at the James.
Katherine Banwell:
Thank you so much for joining us today and taking the time to discuss this important issue. To set the stage for today’s discussion, Let’s start with this important question. How would you define personalized medicine as it relates to AML care?
Dr. Eisfeld:
I define personalized medicine in AML as have a complete testing at time of diagnosis that consists of not only the morphology of the bone marrow, but we call immunophenotyping, which is looking at the surface markers, but also full review of all the chromosomes, which is called cytogenetics. And with those metaphase testing, I’m looking really at all of them and at the hot spots, which is done by a technique called FISH.
And then most importantly, for personalized testing, it also needs to consist of testing the most common, recurrent gene mutations. Changes in the tumor DNA that we know are contributing to the disease biology and also to the response of the leukemia to different genes.
Katherine Banwell:
Thank you for that, Dr. Eisfield. That helps guide us as we begin our conversation.
I imagine that personalizing therapy for a patient requires a number of tests and then thorough review of the test results. Could you provide an overview of the tests necessary to help understand a patient’s specific AML?
Dr. Eisfeld:
Yes. Absolutely. There are multiple things that go in. And let me –even before we go into the tests – point out one thing. Because as we talk about individualized care – and it is also important to keep in mind that it will be also dependent on the age and of the performance status of the patient.
Because we know that all the changes that are going to be reviewed might be more or less severe depending on really the age of the patient we are discussing. The most critical aspect for every AML patient is a bone marrow biopsy and a bone marrow aspirate on which the testing that I have been referring to are performed.
One, it gives us information about how the – after review of the hematologist, it gives us information about the specific kind of the leukemic cell.
And very importantly – and this is a very more recent development that we know about that’s important. It also tells us whether the acute leukemia is really happening as an acute leukemia or whether the patient without knowing it before might have had a precursor issue. And this is something that by now really in just about half a year we can use in addition to direct treatment.
So, it seems like an ancient thing that we think that the microscopic review is important. But that is one part of it.
The second part – and this is, again, all based on the bone marrow biopsy. The inspection of chromosomes, as I mentioned, may be called cytogenetics. This test takes longer. It sometimes takes up to two weeks to result. And similar, looking at the tumor DNAs and mutations that is done either if you’re at a large institution such as Ohio State or other cancer centers. It’s done in house. Whereas at smaller institutions, it would be done by a sent-out testing that has these recommended gene mutation testings done. And some of those result just within a couple of days.
And these are – but we can talk. And I know we are going to talk a little bit more about it later, but we now have targeted therapies available. This is a really super exciting topic we couldn’t have talked about just even five years ago. And those mutations and those DNA changes come back usually within three to five days.
So, that we are able to decide on treatment.
Katherine Banwell:
How can someone ensure they’re getting an accurate diagnosis?
Dr. Eisfeld:
That’s a very good question. I think the most important part is to go to somebody who has seen acute leukemias as a living. It is a very rare cancer as you know. And if you are seen even by a general oncologist who might be a fantastic oncologist, he might just see one or two cases per year. And thus, might not be up-to-date on the newest recommendations. So, I can just advise anybody – even if he lives further away and trusts his physician a lot – to – for the diagnosis and for treatment planning, come to a comprehensive cancer center, at least for a therapy planning. Because what is now possible is many of these treatments is that we can just give advice.
And then you can still receive treatment in some cases really back at home. But be sure the testing was done correctly. And really give you every option to take into consideration what the best treatment would be for you, what the best treatment is for the patient. Having this trip – which can be hours of a drive. And I appreciate this. Having that done once would be, I think, the best thing to do.
Katherine Banwell:
Many cancer types are typically staged. But that’s not the case with AML. AML is often considered low risk or high risk. Is that right?
Dr. Eisfeld:
Yes. And we – I think that’s very well how you put it. And we can even – they even add an intermediate risk by now to it. And I love this question because that’s what I like to study or what I’m studying here. The one important thing to keep in mind – and this is something even many hematologists don’t think about is that the risk assignment of acute leukemia, of AML if you think about it as low, or high, or intermediate risk is risk – or is actually better said not risk, but chances to respond to conventional chemotherapy. So, the way all this was defined is that if you have, for example, a multitude of chromosomal abnormalities – as you call it complex karyotypes – it would be considered adverse. This means your chances of responding to the standard of care in terms of chemotherapy are very, very low.
And similarly, if you have other changes such as a NPM1 mutation, your chances are considered very high. And but – so, the risk assignment with the increase of treatments now changes. We still also – and when I look at that, I think about it in the same way. But in my mind, if I’m talking to a patient, I’m trying to make sure to say, this is considered an intermediate or adverse risk.
But this means that I would not, at the first place, consider you for a standard chemotherapy but rather advise you to participate in a clinical trial or have an alternative care. The second implication especially for younger patients would be to – if you’re intermediate or adverse risk, that you would routinely be considered for bone marrow transplant or stem cell transplant.
Katherine Banwell:
Okay. So, what does it mean to be high risk then?
Dr. Eisfeld:
It means that your likelihood of going into remission – the standard of care is very low. This means – I mean, in very practical numbers, it might be as low as 20 or 30 percent. This meaning getting the leukemia into remission, there are very important differences. The first step at every time in the same high risk means if the patient receives the treatment, how high are the chances that we can get rid of the leukemia?
The second question is how high are the chances once it’s gone that it stays away? Or how high are the chances of relapse? In adverse risk most cases, it’s both – a combination of those. The chances of going into complete remission are lower and the chances of it coming back are higher. So, we have to be very aggressive. This means that we have to consider alternative treatment options. And even if we are then lucky and achieve remission, that we might have to move to more intensive additional treatments such as a bone marrow transplant.
Katherine Banwell:
Dr. Eisfeld, the landscape of AML has changed significantly in recent years. How have advances in testing improved patient care?
Dr. Eisfeld:
It is a different world, Katherine, honestly. I mean, I started practicing in hematology in taking care of AML patients back in Germany actually in the year 2007.
Back then, there was no other testing that was available. All we were guiding and all that we had available was morphology and cytogenetics. And very often, it was very inaccurate. And we also only had two treatment kinds available. One was intensive chemotherapy, and one was something that was just a little bit better than best supportive care. So, many patients could not receive treatment. And the increase in knowledge that we have on a molecular level in AML really did two things at once. On one, we understood we had a more fine tuned understanding on which patients would respond. And the second thing is that this knowledge about the molecular landscape enabled us to have new treatments available that are sometimes in pill form that can target specific mutations in patients who carry these genetic changes.
Katherine Banwell:
Should all AML patients undergo in-depth testing like biomarker testing or cytogenetics?
Dr. Eisfeld:
Yes. Every patient should do that. It can make the difference between life and death. And it can make the difference between receiving – having a hospital stay of four weeks with intensive chemotherapy versus taking the pill at home. This is very rare that this is possible. But it is possible. And of course, you – one would not want to miss this chance if it would be possible.
Katherine Banwell:
With all the new tools that are available, what other factors do you consider when working with an AML patient to choose a treatment approach for them?
Dr. Eisfeld:
The most important aspects are what we call – and this is – I’m glad that you bring this question up because I feel you have to think of – and that was what we’ve been talking about – called disease-associated factors. This is everything in the leukemic cell. They – how does a leukemia looks like? How does the blast look like? What changes are there?
That’s the biggest part of what I would call patient-associated factors: the patient age, the patient performance status, actually the patient. In every – because I think, sometimes, we forget about it. But we just look at all the molecular testing.
But even if – for example, there would be a patient with a very good risk leukemia, where I think, “Oh, this leukemia should respond very well to an intensive chemotherapy.”
If the patient cannot tolerate chemotherapy or – and I see it more often than I would wish for patients who are young who have a great performance status, but they just cannot – they – their family reasons. Small children sometimes – they just cannot be away for so long. This all comes into consideration. So, it’s really important because we all work together as a team. And the right treatment for the leukemia might not be the right treatment for the patient.
And for most cases, however, I think, it will only work if one stands with a whole heart with those physicians, and patients, and family. Because it’s a long journey behind the care that’s being given. And so, this is a joint decision-making, and there are different options that can be done. Of course, I would not advise something where I would think there are no chances of success.
And so, this has to be an open discussion. But this is – it’s very often a very tough treatment to communicate that and see what are the goals of each patient? That will be most important for treatment and decision-making.
Kathrine Banwell:
Dr. Eisfeld, we’ve been discussing treatment choices and how they vary for individual patients. What types of AML treatment classes are currently available?
Dr. Eisfeld:
This is a very good question. The most classic treatment class is intensive chemotherapy. This is just because people might have heard the names. It is called 3 + 7 or 7 + 3, which refers to one weeklong impatient chemotherapy treatment. But you get one chemotherapy for seven days. And the first three days, you get a second treatment as well.
That’s why it’s called three in seven in here, but it’s a total of seven days. So, we have intensive chemotherapy. And there are different flavors of it. But this is usually the backbone. The second class is what I would call a targeted inhibitor. And here we can look at two different aspects. We have target inhibitors for a specific DNA mutation that are found. And specifically, one are called IDH or FLT3 mutations.
And these are pill forms that I usually by now combined with a third drop class which is called hypomethylating agents. And I will go through in a moment.
But these are pills that really only work in patients and carry that genetic change. They have very, very low toxicity and very high chances of working. So, that’s why this testing is so important to see if one is one of the 15 percent of AML patients carrying an IDH mutation – 15 percent isn’t low. And a similar rate carries a FLT3 mutation.
And then there is also going to target inhibitors. That is targeted because it is against what I would call a pathway. The gene that is commonly activated in acute leukemia – and this is called BCL-2 and the drug is called venetoclax (Venclexta).
This is now stormed through the acute myeloid leukemia world in just a few years ago and has been approved as a front-line treatment option for several patients, especially for those who are older. And we know that even patients who respond usually favorably to chemotherapy, some of those also respond well to venetoclax the Bcl-2 inhibitor. The benefit is that this treatment in many cases if it works, can be done as an outpatient in here and has very often lower complications.
It is actually has so good results that I – sometimes it seems too easy. So, we actually advise patients to still try to get – the first time they get the treatment, do it at a center where it’s done more commonly. Because it sometimes – don’t underestimated the power of a pill. And it’s still a very, very powerful drug. So, doing it in a controlled setting – because if cancer cells break down, they break down and can create all sorts of trouble.
So, that is really something – for several leukemias, it can be concerning. And again, now the treatment group would be called hypomethylating agents. The names are azacitidine (Vidaza) and decitabine (Dacogen). And they act in a very different way. They try to change the epigenetics like methylation patterns. And often, if it is an untargeted way of the tumor cells and they can be used alone.
Or very often by now in combination with the targeted inhibitors that I was just mentioning. These are infusions that can be done either over five, seven, or 10 days depending on the combination treatment. And for patients, as I mentioned before, that don’t respond well to many other options to those patients with a complex karyotype. This is, for example, a scenario where patients can just receive this as their only therapy.
Katherine Banwell:
What about stem cell transplant? You didn’t mention that.
Dr. Eisfeld:
Yes. That would be the next one. So, stem cell transplant always comes as an option, which I would call as a maintenance therapy. Again, two aspects. We have two different end goals.
First is get rid of some leukemia. Second is to make sure it stays away. And as soon as the leukemia is in complete remission, depending on the performance status – the agent. Again, in multiple different things. It’s not an easy decision.
At that time, there has to be a conversation. And that always involves a leukemia physician and a transplant physician very often. These are different providers that goes for the risks and benefits. Where the question is if I only continue to do chemotherapy – because it’s never only once. You would always have to repeat your chemotherapy. What is the likelihood that the leukemia comes back, and does it outweigh the risks that comes with the stem cell or bone marrow transplant that comes in here. But for many leukemias, especially for young patients and for patients with higher risks, this is the only chance of a cure. That is the most curative and only curative attempt for many leukemia attempts.
Katherine Banwell:
Where do clinical trials fit into the treatment plan?
Dr. Eisfeld:
That is the absolute backbone. We always have to think about that.
Everything – all the treatment options that I mentioned – have been clinical trials, just very, very short time – very few years ago. So, every patient that comes to a leukemia or a cancer center, clinical trials will be discussed if they’re available. Because they will provide a special opportunity to have even more fine-tuned treatments – either newer agents. And I think what is very important to mention is that all clinical trials that are available would give the option of the best standard of care. And then the hope that a patient wouldn’t be getting any of the best standard of care options that are approved. The hope is that the new agent or added agent in many cases would even do better.
It’s also important that there’s a lot of additional monitoring during the trial. I think it can be seen in two ways as two parts of a coin. In one way, it may be additional visits to the hospital or additional blood draws that are necessary to be sure that the medications are safe, and that researchers and conditions can learn about it. But on the other hand, it also gives you this extra bit of being looked after and really getting checked in and out, making sure that all organs are functioning that everything is just going fine. And many patients appreciate this a lot. And they have this pair of extra eyes on them all the time.
Katherine Banwell:
Dr. Eisfeld, what therapies are available for AML patients who relapse or don’t respond to initial therapy? And is this treatment approach different from those who are newly diagnosed?
Dr. Eisfeld:
Most of the time, the treatments available at relapse are the same available at the first diagnosis. Just because we know now that, for example, if you have a molecular marker that, for example, is available, it would act with also relatively high chance of relapse upset. However, at relapse, the most important thing I personally would do is consider a clinical trial even stronger than in the first mindset.
Because it means that the leukemia outsmarted current treatments very often. So, usually what we would be doing is see if there is a targeted inhibitor or a cell mutation FLT3 or IDH, which I would personally always prefer to go in MLL rearrangement now for the new menin inhibitors where one would go with the same option as if it would have been their diagnosis. But if not to really consider clinical trials is a strong urge.
Katherine Banwell:
Should patients or should relapse patients undergo genetic testing again? Is it necessary?
Dr. Eisfeld:
Yes. At any time. Yes. Because we know that the leukemia changes. And you just can think about it in the way is that the cells that are surviving treatment, they’ve become smart. There was so much poison. There was so much treatment put on them.
And the ones that survive might have a quiet additional chromosome change as additional gene changes. And even if a genetic change has not been present at time of diagnosis, the reason the cell has survived might have been that it has now one of these changes that came up on a later time during treatment or while the cell is hiding somewhere to come back.
Katherine Banwell:
Are there therapies in development that are showing promise for patients with AML?
Dr. Eisfeld:
There are so many of those. It’s hard to count. And this makes me very happy. There are exciting and again, targeted drugs.
Once drug class is called menin inhibitors, which we – which were just published that show high promise.
And again, very difficult to treat several groups of patients who harbor chromosome changes in MLL genes in here. So, that is a very exciting option.
And there’s very exciting treatments with respect to what you call antibodies – monoclonal antibodies that protects the surface proteins that are being checked regularly. And one of those, for example, is called magrolimab. And that has even promise in these high-risk leukemias or adverse risk leukemias.
And then we are not there yet, but I’m sure we will be in the not too near future. There are also multiple trials that are looking at what we call CAR-T cells. But patients might have heard about for lymphomas or acute lymphoblastic leukemias. AML is a little more tricky with respect to those.
But we’ve seen pre-clinical studies that look really exciting. And I think it’s just going to be just a little more fine-tuning to make those easier, available, and more targeted for AML patients. And I’m very much looking forward to seeing those come more onto the market.
Katherine Banwell:
You mentioned the new menin inhibitors. Who are they right for?
Dr. Eisfeld:
We try to find out more, but definitely for patients that have been shown to be beneficial for patients who have chromosomal and rearrangements of the MLL gene or KMT2A gene. And there’s also good data on patients who have NPM1 mutations.
Even though we know – and these are mutations who harbor this kind of genetic change – have now a plethora, which is a great, of treatment options.
Because we know even conventional chemotherapy has been working decently well in them. We know that venetoclax also is supposed to work very well in them. But again, the data on the menin inhibitor with respect to NPM1 mutations is very exciting.
Katherine Banwell:
So, Dr. Eisfeld, we’ve covered a lot of information related to AML care. As a researcher, what other topics are currently top of mind for you in the field of AML? What are you passionate about?
Dr. Eisfeld:
Again, so many parts. I think there are probably three main things that I’d like to name. And I think about it as a little bit outside the box. Most of what we know about AML, we have become so much better. It’s because we have been studying patients who were treated over the past decades on clinical trials and very often here in the U.S. or in Europe.
But all clinical trials have a bias in that most of them have been done A) on patients who are younger than the age of 60. And B) fewer patients of other races and ethnicities included. And had patients not included that have AML, for example, not only in the bone marrow but on extramedullary sites – how we call it – up to 10 percent of their patients. And also, very often have not been done on very old patients where the AML is very common. So, all the patients – patients from other race, ethnicities, or underrepresented minorities, and patients who present with extramedullary disease are currently in my – underserved.
And these are exciting areas and opportunities of research and of active clinical practice. Because those are the patients we need to include if it’s possible now to include them in clinical trials.
If there are no trials available, then make sure any other additional molecular testing it done to understand them better and to advance our disease knowledge that we make sure that we can give the best possible care.
Katherine Banwell:
I think that the most important part is to get the molecular testing, and to enroll into clinical trials, and then to very often biobanking.
Why am I saying that is because our knowledge AML comes from patients who donated some tissue so that we could learn – researchers decades ago could learn about the genes. We know that leukemias differ so much in between patients.
So, I am worried that we are yet missing out on potentially important genes that need to be discovered and where we could develop docs for. This will only be possible with these additional testing.
The second part is to really consider going to larger treatment and larger treatment cancer center. And there are support systems in case that can help in here.
And the third part is to get involved even as early as possible even if you’re not personally affected, with Be The Match – with bone marrow transplant because there’s a paucity of donors, of people of color that makes it harder for these patients to get a potentially curative treatment in here.
We have other options now in bone marrow transplant where one can use only half-matching donors and or other availabilities. But again, that doesn’t outweigh that the bone marrow and donor registry that we need to get better at.
And I can – there are just so many factors – such a high degree of structural racism that affects people from every corner. And I think we as physicians, as society, and everybody need to acknowledge that. And we have to make sure that we get better to, again, give every patient the best care and keep the patient in mind and see what’s right for them at the right moment.
Katherine Banwell:
Where can patients or people who are interested find out about being a donor?
Dr. Eisfeld:
There is the website called “Be the Match” that one can put in. This is probably the best way to get first information.
And usually, at all the cancer sites. And sometimes, there is information at lab donation places, universities, either or the American Red Cross.
Usually those places have information laid out there as well.
Katherine Banwell:
Dr. Eisfeld, before we close, I’d like to get your thoughts on where we stand with progress in the field of AML. What would you like to leave the audience with? Are you hopeful?
Dr. Eisfeld:
I am incredibly hopeful. I hope – when I started working in hematology, as I said at that time, it was just about when imatinib (Gleevec) came out. Which is this CML pill that really revolutionized care. And so, at that time, I would be – all patients on that bone marrow transplant service had chronic myeloid leukemia. And because they all had to undergo bone marrow transplant. Then Gleevec came, and today, there are no such patients who are see or very rarely that require such intensive care.
So, I am very hopeful that in my practice time, which hopefully –and even earlier on – that there will be a time where we find targeted therapies for almost all patients.
Katherine Banwell:
Dr. Eisfeld, thank you so much for joining us today.
Dr. Eisfeld:
It’s an absolute pleasure. And if there are ever any questions, please feel free to reach out. For patients who reach out, we are there to talk to all of you and give advice as good as we can or put you in contact with the right people.
Katherine Banwell:
Thank you. And thank you to all of our collaborators. To learn more about AML and to access tools to help you become a proactive patient, visit powerful patients.org. I’m Katherine Banwell. Thanks for joining us today.
AML Targeted Therapy: How Molecular Test Results Impact Treatment Options
AML Targeted Therapy: How Molecular Test Results Impact Treatment Options from Patient Empowerment Network on Vimeo.
How could the results of molecular testing affect your acute myeloid leukemia (AML) treatment choice? Dr. Sanam Loghavi explains how inhibitor therapy works to treat AML.
Dr. Sanam Loghavi is a hematopathologist and molecular pathologist at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. Learn more about Dr. Loghavi.
Related Resources:
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Transcript:
Katherine Banwell:
Dr. Loghavi, how do molecular test results impact the care plan and treatment choices?
Dr. Sanam Loghavi:
Sure. So, again, associated with really two major factors in the care of the patient. One is the decision of how intensely to treat the patient and whether or not the patient is a candidate for a hematopoietic stem cell transplant. And then the other is the availability of targeted therapies to those patients.
So, there are now several molecular alterations that make the disease amenable to treatment with targeted therapies, including mutations in FLT3, which is a name of a gene, mutations in IDH1, IDH1 or IDH2. And again, depending on the change, the patients may receive targeted therapy.
Katherine Banwell:
Dr. Loghavi, you mentioned inhibitor therapy. What is this treatment, and how does it work?
Dr. Sanam Loghavi:
Sure. So, again, it depends on the medication and it depends on the molecular change.
But essentially what happens when you have a mutation in a gene the normal function of that gene is impaired and a lot of the times that’s why you develop leukemia is because of the impairment of that normal function. So, usually what targeted therapies do, if that mutation is causing an apparent activation of let’s say a signaling molecule, then those targeted therapies will block that signaling. Or if it’s a deregulation of an epigenetic – and epigenetic means beyond genetic, so epigenetic factor, then the goal of that targeted therapy is to maintain that normal function or restore that normal function.
What AML Mutations Are Associated With Adverse Outcomes?
What AML Mutations Are Associated With Adverse Outcomes? from Patient Empowerment Network on Vimeo.
Which acute myeloid leukemia (AML) mutations are linked to adverse outcomes? Dr. Naval Daver from the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center shares insight..Learn about different mutations, treatment options, and the importance of testing.
[ACT]IVATION TIP from Dr. Daver: “Check for mutations to the frontline setting…absolutely, these include FLT3, IDH1, IDH2, TP53, and NPM1 MLL this list will likely continue to grow as we get more targeted therapies in immunotherapies and find benefit in particular subsets, but also in the relapse setting to not depend on the baseline molecular profile because the lipids actually can change. We do see AML as a multiclonal disease, and there can be emergence and escape of different clones, so to check again in the relapse for those same mutations and both in the frontline, the relapse setting.“
Related Resources:
Long-Term Effects Acute Myeloid Leukemia Patients Should Know |
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Transcript:
Art:
Dr. Daver, what mutations are associated with adverse outcomes in AML? What are the best time points to check for these mutations, and what therapeutic options do you consider for patients or harboring these mutations?
Dr. Naval Daver:
This is very, very important, a mutational targeted therapy is probably the biggest overarching change that has occurred in acute myeloid leukemia in the last decade, and of course to implement those therapies. One has to know the mutational profile, the five big mutations that whenever I speak to my patients in clinic today that I talk about wanting to know before I embark on any therapy are FLT3 or FLD3, IDH1, IDH2, TP53, and now, more and more recently, NPM1 or MLL, actually six different mutations, cytogenetic operations, and the reason is that we do have targeted therapies for these mutations, some of these targeted therapies are already approved in the frontline setting like the FLT3 inhibitors, some of these are being evaluated in ongoing Phase III studies like the CD47 magrolimab for TP53.
As well as the menin inhibitors now in frontline setting in combinations of intensive chemo or HMA venetoclax (Venclexta), or MLL NPM1 but I think identifying these targets and getting the patients on the right clinical trial personalized to that target for them has historically shown significant improvements, 20 to 30 percent survival improvements in FLT3, IDH and potentially for the TP53 MLL NPM-1 so definitely on newly diagnosed, I would recommend getting that information and then going on to either standard of care the drugs already approved or clinical trial that incororates that targeted therapy or immunotherapy for a target in the relapse setting the two most important mutations today, or the three most important are FLT3, then IDH as well as MLL NPM1.
Three inhibitors like gilteritinib (Xospata) are already approved. Similarly, IDH inhibitors and combinations of gilteritinib or IDH with venetoclax are really showing very good outcomes, even in relapse three, which about 20 years ago was a very, very, very poor outcome. T
oday, we can get up to 80 percent of these patients to remission, half of them into transplant, and a good number may have long-term survival post-transplant, so it’s very important to not mislead to an IDH1, IDH2 to a relapse setting.
And then now with the menin inhibitors we’re also looking in all our patients for MLL rearrangement, NPM1 in relapse, because this could open the door for menin inhibitor-based therapy, which again can give up to 50 percent remission and a path to transplant. Now many patients at MD Anderson who have gone through too many inhibitors, transplant and are alive and ongoing at two and three years.
So the bottom line is, it’s important you check at my activation tip for this question is it’s important to check for mutations to the frontline setting…absolutely, these include FLT3, IDH1, IDH2, TP53, and NPM1 MLL this list will likely continue to grow as we get more targeted therapies in immunotherapies and find benefit in particular subsets, but also in the relapse setting to not depend on the baseline molecular profile because the lipids actually can change.
We do see AML as a multiclonal disease, and there can be emergence and escape of different clones, so to check again in the relapse for those same mutations and both in the frontline, the relapse setting.
To try to get on to a therapy, whether it’s approved or clinical trial that incorporates those targeted therapies, which has historically shown a significant improvement in both response and long-term survival.
Share Your Feedback About [ACT]IVATED AML
AML Clinical Trials Critical to Treatment Breakthroughs and Improvements
AML Clinical Trials Critical to Treatment Breakthroughs and Improvements from Patient Empowerment Network on Vimeo.
Why are acute myeloid leukemia (AML) clinical trials so critical? Dr. Naval Daver from the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center shares his perspective about clinical trials. Learn how clinical trials help both current and future AML patients.
[ACT]IVATION TIP from Dr. Daver: “Clinical trials are critical, both for the patients themselves to get access to what we call tomorrow’s medicine today as well as potentially to help move the entire field forward.”
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Related Resources:
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What Promising AML Treatments Are Available for Newly Diagnosed Patients? |
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Transcript:
Art:
Dr. Daver, what is the importance of clinical trial participation as it relates to breakthroughs in AML, and what advice do you have for AML patients considering a clinical trial?
Dr. Naval Daver: Clinical trials are critical for the progress that we have already seen an acute myeloid leukemia, the drugs that have been improved in the last six, seven years, including venetoclax (Venclexta), FLT3 inhibitors, midostaurin (Rydapt or Tauritmo), gilteritinib (Xospata), hopefully quizartinib other emerging targeted therapies…IDH1, IDH2 inhibitors, menin inhibitors, CD47 antibodies, we’ve learned about all of them and have got approvals and many of them through the ongoing clinical trials.
I think it’s very important for patients to realize that in most large academic centers, we will only participate in the clinical trial if we think it has the potential to improve the standard of care in the future. There’s very little incentive for academic investigators or clinical investigators, such as myself, we’re very, very busy to get involved in a trial if we don’t think that it has the potential to improve the outcome or change the nature of AML therapy in the future, so a lot of patients often ask me, Oh, I want the randomized or placebo arm. There is no real placebo alone in any AML study that I’m aware of, most of the studies will use standard of care, which is what you would’ve gotten wherever you were getting treatment at home, locally, community hospital versus a standard of care plus where the new drug will be added, whether it’s the FLT3 inhibitor, the CD47 antibody, the menin inhibitor
So there’s a good chance, 50 percent that you’re going to get standard of care plus that we think has the potential to improve the outcome, of course, you never know, that’s what you do, the trial, but we think based on the previous pre-clinical data to pass when the page to deliver this looks like it will improve the outcome for this molecular or site group versus standard of care, which is what you will have gotten.
So I think it’s important to realize that you will never get less on standard of care and any clinical trial, at least in the AML field, and at least in our experience that they understand.
Now, beyond that, there’s also a Phase I in two states, and those are the ones that we focus on quite a bit at MD Anderson, these are single arm studies, meaning everybody will get the investigational agent combo, so azacitidine (Onureg or Vidaza) and venetoclax (Venclexta), we were one of the first sites to work on and leave this study and all of our patients in 2015, 2016, we’re getting this regiment, it was not approved to much later in 2019, 2020, and for those three, four years, our patients, hundreds of patients were able to get that combination, which probably cured many, many more than would have been cured to the standard of care until, of course, I’ve got a pro four years later, but for an option, of course, you cannot wait four years, so I’m a huge believer in clinical trials, I think it’s really, really important, both for the patients themselves as well as for the field, for us to be able to move the entire AML field forward for the next decade, and I would very strongly consider looking at or discussing with your treating physician trial options, and then you can look at them on your own through clinicaltrials.gov, or other sites with leukema and lymphoma that give a lot of information on clinical trials.
So my activation tip related to this question is that I think clinical trials are critical, both for the patients themselves to get access to what we call tomorrow’s medicine today as well as potentially to help move the entire field forward, all of the clinical drug approvals in progress we have seen in AML in the last six, seven years have come through clinical trials that patients in the past have agreed to kindly participate and helped probably themselves by getting better medications and combinations, and definitely the field to move forward, so definitely a big proponent for clinical trials.
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Why Is the Menin Pathway Important in AML?
Why Is the Menin Pathway Important in AML? from Patient Empowerment Network on Vimeo.
What should acute myeloid leukemia (AML) patients know about the menin pathway? Dr. Naval Daver from the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center shares information from ASH 2022. .Learn research updates about the menin pathway and ongoing clinical trials on the pathway.
[ACT]IVATION TIP from Dr. Daver: “Patients should be checked for arrangements like MLL rearrangement NPM1 mutation, new fusions as these may be amenable to therapy with the menin inhibitors, there are multiple trials with five different menin inhibitors, single agent trials and also combination trials now ongoing across multiple centers both in the U.S. and ex-U.S.“
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Transcript:
Art:
Dr. Daver, what is a menin pathway in AML? And why is it significant?
Dr. Naval Daver:
The menin pathway is very recently discussed that way, the pathway, of course, itself has been known for almost a decade, this is an epigenetic pathway, and in certain subsets of AML such as MLL rearranged NPM1 mutated as well as other fusions, we find that there is an up regulation of the menin impact rearrangement, and this actually results in increased production of two enzymes called meis-1 and hox-DNA) these enzymes actually result in a differentiation blockade. So normally, in the bone marrow we have the early progenitor cells, this then leads to be a report cell and leads to mature neutrophils and monocytes and blood cells, but in a differentiation blockade, we would see that those cells over time would start generating mutations and become leukemic cells.
So one of the most physiological ways to treat AML is to actually remove the differentiation blockade, so the normal process of differentiation with progress, and so these menin inhibitors are able to reduce the levels of MEIS1 and HOXA by doing this, they allow the normal differentiation cascade to progress, and they’re not cytotoxic targeted chemo, they’re not directly killing leukemia, but they’re actually allowing the leukemia itself to then mature to no monocytes and neutrophils.
And so now there are five different menin inhibitors in ongoing clinical trials, but two of these are more advanced and have shown data recently in the ASH 2022 meeting the newer drugs, and are showing close to 40 to 50 percent single agent efficacy, and we believe that after the FLT3, IDH1, IDH2 inhibitors, which have been approved in the last five years, the menin inhibitors are probably the next other targeted therapies that will hopefully get approval and they eventually be used in the frontline setting in combination approaches.
The activation tip related to this question is that patients should be checked for arrangements like MLL rearrangement NPM1 mutation, new fusions as these may be amenable to therapy with the menin inhibitors, there are multiple trials with five different menin inhibitors, single agent trials and also combination trials now ongoing across multiple centers both in the U.S. and ex-U.S., and if one does have an aberration that will be sensitive to such menin inhibitor-based therapy, I would strongly recommend considering trying to get on one of those trials because we believe that these will be the best outcomes with such standard therapies rather than using the standard or traditional chemotherapies.
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AML Treatment Approaches Expand for Older and High-Risk Patients
AML Treatment Approaches Expand for Older and High-Risk Patients from Patient Empowerment Network on Vimeo.
How have acute myeloid leukemia (AML) treatment approaches expanded for older and high-risk patients? Dr. Naval Daver from the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center shares insight about additional treatment options. Learn about the potential for long-term cures for these patient groups.
[ACT]IVATION TIP from Dr. Daver: “There is a dramatic progress, especially in the treatment of older unfit AML with the approval of the azacitidine-venetoclax combination.”
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Long-Term Effects Acute Myeloid Leukemia Patients Should Know |
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Transcript:
Art:
Dr. Daver, for older and high-risk AML patients, how are the treatment approaches expanding?
Dr. Naval Daver:
In older and high-risk AML, the major approval has been the combination of azacitidine (Onureg or Vidaza) and venetoclax (Venclexta), which is a BCL-2 inhibitor, the regimen was evaluated in a large Phase III study called the VIALE study, where we looked at the standard of care for the last two decades for older unfit AML, which azacitidine alone versus the combination of azacitidine and venetoclax and this combination showed a three times higher remission rate, 75 versus 28 percent overall remission rate as well as an improvement in overall survival and long-term survivors.
So this has led to great progress with now remission rates of 75 percent achievable in older unfit AML and many of them being durable at three years with ongoing follow-up, so this has really opened the door for us to be able to treat patients up to 75, 80, 85 years of age with effective therapy given the three parts of these to achieve remission, which is usually associated with freedom from transfusion improvement, quality of life, improved energy, less time in the hospital, less infections.
The other progress now is coming from the use of targeted therapies as well in these populations, and even though the HMA venetoclax or azacitidine combination is doing very well.
We now have data, in fact, from the ASH 2022 December meeting that at three years, about 25 percent or so I would still remain alive with azacitidine was even or 8 percent, now it’s 25 percent. But, of course, we want to do much better than that, and so this is where we are incorporating the targeted therapies, the FLT3 inhibitors, the IDH1, IDH2 inhibitors, menin inhibitors, and immunotherapies onto the backbone of azacitidine-venetoclax, which we hope will further improve that long-term survival cure from 25 to hopefully 50 to 60 percent and beyond.
So a lot of progress, you know, going from less than 10 percent, a 30 percent survival, long-term, and I think in the next few years, even up to 50 percent with some of these new combinations. The activation tip related to this question is that there is a dramatic progress, especially in the treatment of older unfit AML with the approval of the azacitidine-venetoclax combination.
This regimen is now giving high remission rates, which approximate remission rates that are seen with traditional intensive chemotherapy without the mucositis and toxicities and better volatility, and we are now working to further improve the remission and the durability of this dominant of initial.
…potentially adding targeted therapy such as FLT3 inhibitors, IDH1, IDH2 menin inhibitors, and we think that potentially in the next decade, we could be achieving long-term cures in a large proportion of older unfit AML, which was something one could just dream of a decade ago.
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What Are the Latest Acute Myeloid Leukemia Therapies?
What Are the Latest Acute Myeloid Leukemia Therapies? from Patient Empowerment Network on Vimeo.
What are the latest treatments in acute myeloid leukemia (AML)? Dr. Catherine Lai from Penn Medicine discusses the increase in available AML treatments. Learn about combination therapies and treatment options for patients with IDH1, IDH2, and FLT3 mutations.
[ACT]IVATION TIP from Dr. Lai: “Ask your physician and your oncologist when you’re talking with them about what all the newest therapies are and what would be specifically the best treatment for their specific leukemia with respect to the different mutations.”
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What Promising AML Treatments Are Available for Newly Diagnosed Patients? |
Transcript:
Art:
Dr. Lai, for newly diagnosed AML patients, what are the latest available therapies?
Dr. Catherine Lai:
That’s a great question. The last, I would say, a handful of years have really seen a dramatic increase in the number of new treatment options for AML patients, specifically since 2017, the FDA has approved 10 new drugs for AML, that’s both for patients who are newly diagnosed and in the relapsed refractory setting.
And so what I would say is that we break our patients into two different categories in terms of being able to tolerate intensive chemotherapy versus non-intensive chemotherapy, and as well as looking at specifically targeted mutations that patients may have so that we can better understand the disease but also treat these patients more specifically to try to maximize efficacy while minimizing toxicity.
And so specifically, I would say for patients who have FLT3 mutations, there are drugs such as midostaurin (Rydapt) and gilteritinib (Xospata), there are drugs for mutations in IDH1 and IDH2, enasidenib (Idhifa) and ivosidenib (Tibsovo) and recently, or in December of 2022, olutasidenib (Rezlidhia) was also approved for IDH1-mutated patients as well.
We have a general targeted agent that’s an oral chemotherapy that probably has made the biggest difference in how we treat patients called venetoclax (Venclexta), and that’s used in combination with azacitidine (Onureg) or decitabine (Dacogen), or low dose cytarabine (Cytosar).
Although most commonly in the United States, we use azacitidine or decitabine in combination with the venetoclax, and that I think is really what I’d say has been practice changing for the most part, in terms of both increasing the complete remission rates as well as the overall survival for these patients. So I would say there are a lot of new drugs. It is all very exciting.
The biggest activation tip in terms of takeaways is to ask your physician and your oncologist when you’re talking with them about what all the newest therapies are and what would be specifically the best treatment for their specific leukemia with respect to the different mutations.
Art:
Okay. Dr. Lai, what are the latest approaches to combination chemotherapy to treat AML?
Dr. Catherine Lai:
So, the latest approaches for combination chemotherapy would be in the combination of a hypomethylating agent, azacitidine or decitabine in combination with venetoclax. This is the most practice-changing combination that has been approved since 2017 to 2018, and now more recently, what’s been happening is now looking, so we call that a doublet, and now it’s been looking at…what we’ve been studying is now whether or not triplets are more effective, when we do have triple combinations, we do see an increase in toxicity and so on, we haven’t come up with the right algorithm in terms of what that exact formula should be, but often I think about it in kind of a three-fold in terms of wins the right time, what’s the right combination, and how do we see in the drugs, and I think the sequencing is the biggest thing that we don’t yet know, and how do we combine the two different..two different drugs in a way, and how do we give them in a way that will maximize efficacy, will minimize the toxicity, so as an example is, Do we give two drugs for a specific period of time, and then after some determined time point, do we…
And change it to a different set of combination of drugs to make sure that patients are getting the most benefit of the drugs, and we don’t know that yet, but I think that that’s where the general direction…where the landscape is heading, so the activation tip I would take home from this is just to have a conversation with your physician about potential clinical trials and how combination therapies are being used.
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How Does the Presence of Molecular Markers Affect AML Care?
How Does the Presence of Molecular Markers Affect AML Care? from Patient Empowerment Network on Vimeo.
Dr. Farhad Ravandi-Kashani reviews how the presence of gene mutations can influence acute myeloid leukemia (AML) treatment choices and discusses new molecular markers being researched for future AML care.
Dr. Farhad Ravandi-Kashani is professor of medicine and Chief of the Section of Developmental Therapeutics in the Department of Leukemia at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, TX. Learn more about Dr. Ravandi-Kashani.
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Transcript:
Laura Beth:
How do test results impact AML care and treatment decisions?
Dr. Ravandi:
So, in the first place, the presence or absence of certain mutations can be predictable outcome. Some subsets of leukemias are, for the lack of a better term, more favorable.
I personally don’t think there is anything favorable about any leukemia, but some are easier to treat, and some are easier to cure than others. There is one specific subtype called acute promyelocytic leukemia that we actually completely treat differently. We don’t use even chemotherapy in that subset of leukemia.
It has almost 100 percent success rate. And the treatment of other subsets can also be tailored, depending on these molecular and chromosomal changes. So, the initial therapy can be actually changed. There are now, for example, targeted agents that can be added to the chemotherapy, during initial chemotherapy.
And also, once the patient is in remission, depending on favorable or unfavorable their leukemia is, they may be offered allogeneic stem cell transplant. So, yes, this information is highly important. In fact, I would say crucial for our decision-making in leukemia therapy these days.
Laura Beth:
So, what is new in AML research related to molecular markers?
Dr. Ravandi:
Well, it depends on your definition of new, but FLT3 mutations are very important because they’re now several FLT3 inhibitors, and as I mentioned, the initial therapies are different, to some extent. The IDH mutations are very important, again, because they are specific targeted agents.
TP53 mutations are important because, unfortunately, they are particularly unfavorable.
This is completely hot off the press, but there are subsets of AML called MLL rearranged leukemias that can respond to these drugs called Menin inhibitors.
There are other mutations that have been discovered, many other ones, that there are no specific treatments for at the moment, but there’s a lot of research on.
