Breakthrough in preventing, treating blood cancers

Latest studies being presented at the 66th American Society of Hematology (ASH) Annual Meeting and Exposition highlight progress in preventing and treating blood cancers

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San Diego: Latest studies being presented at the 66th American Society of Hematology (ASH) Annual Meeting and Exposition highlight progress in preventing and treating blood cancers.

"It's very encouraging to see advances being made across the continuum of care for blood cancers," said Dr. Surbhi Sidana, MD, an associate professor of medicine at Stanford University in California, who moderated the briefing Diagnosing and Treating Blood Cancers and "Almost" Cancers.

"In this set of studies, investigators are focused on improving our understanding of environmental exposures that can increase cancer risk, ascertaining whether early intervention can improve outcomes for patients with a high-risk precancerous condition, identifying promising new treatment approaches for patients for whom existing options fall short, and shedding light on the ways in which socioeconomic factors may limit patients' access to a potentially life-saving treatment," Dr. Sidana said.

In the first study, the drug daratumumab cut the risk of disease progression by half in patients who faced a high risk of developing multiple myeloma (a cancer of plasma cells, which are found in the bone marrow and are part of the immune system) within two years.

The second and third studies involved patients with chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL), the most common form of leukemia in adults in the United States.

In previously untreated patients, a combination regimen of two oral drugs significantly lengthened the time until the disease worsened and caused fewer adverse effects compared with a standard treatment regimen.

And in early results of an ongoing trial, patients with returning CLL after at least two prior treatments responded well to epcoritamab, a biologic agent that is a bispecific CD20/CD3 T cell engager.

In the fourth study, researchers found that first responders who worked at the World Trade Center site following the September 11, 2001, attacks were three times more likely to have genetic changes associated with an increased risk of blood cancer compared with non-exposed first responders or members of the public.

"Those with the genetic changes also have as much as a five-fold increased risk for leukemia", the report said.

And in the last study, researchers showed that, for patients with acute myeloid leukemia, socioeconomic factors can limit access to a potentially curative transplant of blood-forming stem cells from a healthy donor.

"Patients were less likely to receive such a transplant and more likely to die without receiving one if they lived in neighborhoods where more residents had less than a high school education, had incomes below the federal poverty level, or received benefits from federal assistance programs", the report said.

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