VIDEO: Disease-modifying drugs needed in myelofibrosis

I think the biggest challenge with myelofibrosis is that outside of bone marrow transplantation, which is really only a modality that offers the potential for cure to a segment of our MF patient population, we don't have drugs at our disposal that reliably and dramatically affect the disease process in a way that is reassuring.

We don't really induce remissions in the disease, and therefore, we don't have drugs that are clearly disease course modifying. So, we have JAK inhibitors, which are absolutely beneficial to our patients, and without them, we'd really be in trouble. But it would be hard to say that any of those JAK inhibitors remit the disease, whether it's bone marrow, histopathologically, or molecular remissions. But I do think patients do live longer on those drugs because they feel better and have reduction spleen reversal cachexia and a better performance status and in some cases, less anemia.

But what we're really trying to develop is the next lines of therapy, or either combination approaches or alternative non-JAK inhibitor therapies that actually, and JAK inhibitor therapies actually, new JAK inhibitors that are disease modifying, hence disease course modify.