Doctor and Patient Teamwork: ... Video Transcript

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ANNOUNCER: During treatment, doctors will test for two things, the cytogenetic response or how the bone marrow cells are responding to treatment, and the hematological response, the blood count.

RICHARD STONE, MD: That means your blood counts have been normalized. Your bone marrow looks pretty good under the microscope. The next most deep response would be a cytogenetic response. That's when your Philadelphia chromosome containing cells in your bone marrow goes down. If it goes down to a situation where less than 35% of the cells have the Philadelphia chromosome, that's a major response.

ANNOUNCER: Doctors should make sure their patients understand these tests, how often they are done, what they measure, and what the specific results mean.

STEPHEN O'BRIEN, MD, PhD: I'm not particularly interested in blood counts monitoring although of course it's useful and important to have a normal blood count. Many of the drugs we use in chronic myeloid leukemia can produce that. We know from years of experience that a normal blood count doesn't necessarily indicate disease won't progress in due course. It doesn't alter the natural history of the disease. Whereas cytogenetic response based on a bone marrow aspirate every six months is important and we know from historical experience again that better cytogenetic results equate to better survival in the long term.

ANNOUNCER: Among the drug therapies currently available, Gleevec is being hailed by many health professionals, as a new breakthrough.

STEPHEN O'BRIEN, MD, PhD: For the last 15 years the drug of choice was interferon therapy which is quite a difficult therapy to take, in that one has to inject oneself everyday, much as a diabetic would. And the side effects for the drug are really quite frequent and quite troublesome. More recently, in the last four years, we've been seeing very exciting developments with imatinib, with Gleevec therapy for CML which is a very much more targeted and specific therapy for the molecular abnormality in this disease.

RICHARD STONE, MD: Gleevec which is relatively risk-free. The side effects are minimal. There are some side effects but very few patients in the clinical trials have had to stop the drugs because of side effects. And the response rate is very high.

DAVID SAVAGE, MD: This is a disease that is very treatable and even curable. If a cure is not feasible, still there is interferon which can prolong survival and Gleevec which certainly seems to be a very potent agent.

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