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CML Therapy Update


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Summary & Participants

Many CML patients have have been treated with imatinib which has improved treatment outcomes.

Medically Reviewed On: July 21, 2009

Webcast Transcript

JOHN GOLDMAN, MD: The story of imatinib, as it's unfolded, has really been very exciting. If you go back ten years, we had nothing really to offer a patient other than interferon, which was complicated, or bone marrow transplant, which was very dangerous.

And then in 1998, for the first time we were able to use this new agent which rapidly became a very exciting new agent and many patients in the last eight years have benefited very substantially from the use of imatinib.

ANNOUNCER: Researchers are tracking patients' progress while on imatinib or gleevec through a study called the IRIS trial.

NEIL SHAH, MD, PhD: The IRIS trial was designed to assess imatinib for its effectiveness and compare it directly to interferon alpha plus cytarabine, the previous medical standard of care.

What we know, with longer-term follow up with patients on the IRIS trial, is more than 90% of patients are alive without having succumbed to CML with five years of follow up. It's clearly improving the overall survival.

ANNOUNCER: In order to follow the patient's progress, clinicians monitor their hematologic, cytogenetic and molecular responses.

NEIL SHAH, MD, PhD: Imatinib in the chronic phase of CML is highly effective at yielding complete hematologic responses or normalizing blood counts. Nearly 98% of patients treated with it will develop a normal white blood cell count. While that's encouraging, we do think that deeper response, the cytogenetic response is more critical to determining whether a patient will have an improvement in overall survival on imatinib therapy.

ANNOUNCER: After five years of follow up, 87% of iris trial patients acheived a complete cytogenetic response, which means that cytogenetic testing will reveal no evidence of the philadelphia chromosones.

ANNOUNCER: Data shows that patients who achieve early cytogenetic and molecular responses have a better chance of staying in the chronic phase without progressing to the advanced stages of CML.

JORGE CORTES, MD: Patients that at 12 months have had what we call a major molecular response, which are the patients who have the lowest volumes of the number of copies of this abnormal gene. Those patients have a very good probability of being alive without transforming to the advanced stages. 100% are alive without transformation.

ANNOUNCER: Imatinib's side effects are generally minor and with over 5 years experience with the drug, doctors know how to manage these side effects.

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