Articles related to LEUKEMIA

Overall, NGS-based MRD analysis in ALL seems to be especially helpful in patients with RQ-PCR+ MolNE and may help to discriminate true MRD from false positivity in this considerable and clinically important group.

In this interview, Nicole Lamanna, MD, discusses challenges and application of BTK inhibitors, results with pirtobrutinib in hematologic malignancies, specifically addressing CLL, and shares her personal observations regarding pirtobrutinib use.

Oral azactidine substantially improved survival compared with placebo irrespective of baseline MRD status, and the survival benefit with oral-AZA relative to placebo was greater in the baseline MRD+ subgroup than in the MRD− subgroup. Multivariate analysis confirmed the significant independent treatment effect of oral-AZA vs. placebo on OS and RFS when controlling for MRD status at baseline.

Perelman School of Medicine’s David Teachey, MD, reviews outcomes and implications from two recent Children’s Oncology Group trials and describes current research with daratumumab and CAR T-cell therapy.

In an integrated analysis of mutations and clinical outcomes, comprising 2,200 patients with TP53-mutated myelodysplastic syndrome (MDS) with excess blasts (EB) or TP53-mutated acute myeloid leukemia (AML), the authors state that mutant TP53 AML and MDS-EB “do not differ with respect to molecular characteristics and survival” and argue these entities should be considered a single molecular disease entity. In a commentary to the above paper, TP53 and the star-crossed lovers MDS and AML, John Welch, MD, PhD of Washington University School of Medicine writes, “As a junior Hematology/Oncology fellow, I was told there were two types of physicians: splitters and mergers. That is, clinicians either seek to diagnose increasingly homogenously narrow groups of patients based on increasingly refined, shared characteristics, or they seek to find broad, overarching patterns that unite diagnostic classifications. Hematologic malignancies have been fertile ground for the diagnostic splitters of the world. On the other hand, there have been some noteworthy exceptions. Sometimes it is a technological advance that allows for the synthesis of disparate diagnoses.”

In a single-center study of 240 patients with lymphoid malignancies — 181 with CLL, 21 with WM, and 38 with other non-Hodgkin lymphomas (NHLs) – patients with CLL were significantly more likely to have an antibody response to the Moderna vaccine compared to the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine. This superior response was demonstrated in both treatment naïve and treated CLL populations in the study.