VIDEO: Intercepting relapse shows potential in AML

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So I touched a little bit on one strategy, which is intercepting relapse. And this is to targeting measurable residual disease, MRD. So instead of waiting for leukemia to turn into relapse, which is more challenging to treat, and the patients are often sicker, maybe we can find a window where patients are not as sick, but yet we know that they're destined to relapse because they have this MRD.

And we understand better why these cells are still there and not cleared by chemo and targeted. So that would be a general approach to decreasing the risk of relapse, but also in general combination therapies, especially with treatments that have well-established mechanisms of actions, non-overlapping mechanisms of action where the two drugs are not necessarily hitting the same cell or the same mechanism, but also non-overlapping mechanisms of resistance. So this is borrowing from HIV, for example.

The success of treating HIV is because we, you know, the scientists came up with ways to target the virus in different methods and not allow it to adapt to therapy. And that's what we need in leukemia and in cancer in general, therapies that are non-toxic, that don't have excessive side effects, that have non-overlapping mechanisms of resistance and hopefully would target the heterogeneity of the disease, the different subsets that may not respond to a single therapy on its own.