VIDEO: Unmet needs of patients with ALL

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Patients with ALL — we certainly have learned a lot more about this patient population and have many more treatment options than we used to. But this is still a disease that can be very aggressive. There are certainly still many patients that don't do as well as we would hope with the treatment options we currently have available — whether that means their disease doesn't respond or they experience unacceptable side effects of treatment. So major unmet needs coming up with tolerable and effective treatment regimens for our oldest patients, patients who are over the age of 55, 60 years old or younger patients with comorbidities or elevated measures of adiposity or obesity, those patients do less well with conventional treatment approaches.

And so we need to continue to develop novel treatment approaches for these patients and really get more information about how those novel approaches do over the long term. Are these responses durable and are they going to be an acceptable substitute for more conventional approaches? So, definitely patients who don't tolerate traditional approaches need better therapeutic options. And then patients with really high-risk genetic ALL whether that's pH-like ALL, or patients with P53 or hypodiploid ALL, just to name a few. These patients do less well with conventional approaches and less well with our novel approaches. So, these patients we certainly still need more effective treatment options, and for those patients out of the gate with additional treatment approaches and when they relapse there are certainly patients who run out of treatment options and we certainly hope to broaden our treatment armamentarium for those patients.

Another group of patients that really needs better therapies are patients with T-cell ALL. So T-cell ALL, particularly patients with so-called early T-cell precursor ALL, we really pretty much treat with conventional approaches. We don’t have novel agents yet for these patients and more research is really needed to figure out how to better treat this population with unmet need.