When might doctors combine dr... Video Transcript

Participants

, Michael Mauro MD, Gwen L. Nichols MD

Summary

Doctors often treat cancers by combining more than one drug. Learn how ongoing studies are exploring this possibility for chronic myeloid leukemia (CML).

Webcast Transcript

As soon as we understood how well we did with Gleevec alone, we right away started to look towards what we might be able to do for patients who didn't respond fully, or could we do even better than we were doing with Gleevec alone? Logically, we first explored drugs that we knew were useful in CML, interferon and ARA-C. And those are two of the most well studied combination potentials for patients with CML. Suffice it to say that they looked to be—they looked to be safe, and they looked to be fairly well tolerated, but whether they're going to be better than Gleevec alone still needs to be carefully studied in a randomized trial. And that study will be running soon in the United States, and has actually already started in Europe.

Other combinations—and there are many out there—are geared towards helping patients that don't achieve the kind of responses we like to see at certain time points. And there are a long list of newer drugs that are being developed, some that are like Gleevec, some that are like standard chemotherapy drugs, and some that fall into different categories altogether that are useful in CML, at least from what we know so far, and are being combined with Gleevec.