Oldest Patient ‘Cured’ of HIV Still in Remission 5 Years After Transplant for AML
A 68-year-old man with HIV-1 who underwent hematopoietic cell transplant (HCT) for acute myelogenous leukemia 5 years ago has been free of HIV infection for 35 months after stopping antiretroviral treatment (ART), according to a case report. The patient received an HCT from a donor with the rare delta-32 mutation, which causes a CCR5 deletion […]
Opinion | When a Revolutionary Cancer Treatment Causes Cancer
Sekeres is a leukemia specialist. My patient was young, in his thirties, and had a terrible leukemia that refused to be vanquished with multiple rounds of chemotherapy. Many of my adult patients, at the time of their diagnosis, tell me they are so happy they have acute lymphoblastic leukemia, and not acute myeloid leukemia, because […]
Opinion | A Letter From a Miami Jail to the American Board of Internal Medicine
Sekeres is a leukemia specialist. American Board of Internal Medicine (ABIM) Philadelphia, PA Dear ABIM, In the spirit of Henry David Thoreau and Martin Luther King, Jr. — both of whom penned essays while they were serving jail time — and in follow-up to the previous letters I scribed from a Cleveland jail, I write […]
FLT3 Inhibitor Doubles Overall Survival in Acute Myeloid Leukemia
Incorporating quizartinib into standard treatment for newly diagnosed acute myeloid leukemia (AML) followed by maintenance therapy with the investigational FLT3 inhibitor improved survival for patients with internal-tandem-duplication (ITD) mutations of FLT3, a placebo-controlled randomized trial showed. In the phase III study of over 500 patients undergoing standard induction and consolidation therapy, median overall survival (OS) […]
Clinical Challenges: Treating AML With IDH1 and IDH2 Mutations
About 20% of acute myeloid leukemia (AML) harbors a mutation in the isocitrate dehydrogenase (IDH) genes, IDH1 or IDH2. Within the last decade, treatment for these patients “has changed significantly” with the development of first-in-class IDH1 and IDH2 inhibitors, said Tapan Kadia, MD, of the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. Moreover, “treatment paradigms are […]
AML Study Suggests Intensive Chemo Unnecessary Before Allo-HCT
NEW ORLEANS — Patients with relapsed or refractory acute myeloid leukemia (AML) achieved similar outcomes with allogeneic hematopoietic stem-cell transplant (allo-HCT) whether they went to transplant as soon as possible or underwent intensive salvage chemotherapy first, the randomized ASAP trial suggested. At day 56 post-transplant, complete remission (CR) rates were a similar 84.1% for patients […]