How have patient's experience... Video Transcript

Participants

, Michael Mauro MD, Gwen L. Nichols MD

Summary

New treatments for chronic myeloid leukemia (CML) have translated into increased remissions and longer survival. Hear one CML expert share his hopefulness for CML patients.

Webcast Transcript

With current treatments, we've been able to really change the natural history of CML, as other treatments have in the past. With interferon, historically, for example, the survival with chronic phase patients changed from, say, three to five years to six years or up to ten years in very good responding patients. We've only been using newer treatment options like Gleevec for about six years total, and about three years with a large number of patients right at diagnosis. So, so far we've seen very good remission rates with aggressive blood and cytogenetic remission.

Historically, with other treatments that translated into changing those windows of these phases of CML, so we expect that with newer treatments, the duration of chronic phase in remission should be much—at least as long as interferon, based on the success of Gleevec over interferon, and hopefully longer. In addition, Gleevec works in the advanced phases of CML. In some accelerated phase patients, we can see very good remission and prolonged survival that's quite dramatic. In the blast phase of CML, Gleevec works well for some time, but often relapse occurs in most patients. So although we've changed the survival, we haven't changed it as dramatically as we have in the early stages.