Hematologic Malignancies

At the Fifth Annual Conference of the Association for Value-­Based Cancer Care in Washington, DC, Grant Lawless, RPh, MD, FACP, of the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, moderated a multidisciplinary panel on value-based care for patients with multiple myeloma.

Disease progression is slower and overall survival (OS) is greater in patients with chronic myeloid leukemia (CML) who are being monitored for their response to tyrosine kinase inhibitor (TKI) therapy and show good adherence. However, few clinicians monitor response and adherence to oral TKI treatment in patients with CML.

An investigational first-in-class ­anticancer quinolone derivative, vosaroxin, extended median over­­all survival (OS) when used with cytarabine (Cytosar-U) in a phase 3 clinical trial of patients with relapsed or refrac­­tory acute myeloid leukemia (AML), although the difference was not significant.

San Francisco, CA—In patients with acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL), assessment of minimal residual disease (MRD) is increasingly used to evaluate response to treatment. An antibody that recruits the body’s T-cells to attack MRD in patients with ALL whose disease is in remission can prevent full relapse.

A long-standing treatment standard for indolent non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL) has fallen victim to the chopping block, so to speak, at least in Germany.

Children with acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) had no drop-off in efficacy with an anthracycline-free regimen that also reduced the long-term risk of cardiotoxicity, reported Andre Baruchel, MD, PhD, Chief of Pediatric Hematology, Robert Debré University Hospital, Paris, France.