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Updates from ASH

Quick update from Cheryl-Anne Simoneau of The CML Society of Canada who is attending ASH in Atlanta GA, alongside other CML patient Advocates.

"From ASH: Hitting the ground running! But three key messages from yesterday: (1) There is a window of opportunity, within the first 2 - 3 years after diagnosis of CML to make sure the patient achieves the best response in order to have a "normal" life span.(2) Early response to treatment (within the first three months) significantly improves overall outcomes for CML patients and achieving these response will allow many more patients to achieve MMR and CMR.(3) patients need to work closely with their doctors to help them achieve better adherence rates - side effects need to be given much more attention. My personal opinion is that side effects along with financial drug access issues are the biggest contributors as to why patients are not more adherent to treatment."

Take a look at the Home Page for link to abstracts and papers from this years ASH. I have just tagged the ones that caught my eye- also others on ASH, ASCO etc.conference page.

Sandy

Live from the ASH Press conference room!
Dr. Cortes just presented saying that difficult to treat patients such as patients who have not achieved responses with two or three prior therapies are getting good response to Ponatinib and importantly the responses are durable. The side effect profile shows that Ponatnib is relatively easy to tolerate. I video tapped the entire session so more notes will follow.

Exciting presentation
Dr. Francois Mahon just gave an excellent overview of the stopping trials and seeded the idea that CML is a model for raising awareness of curability. He also pointed out that the cost savings by stop trial in France is about 4.6 million Euro's!
He stated that it is very rare for a patient to have a recurrence of significantly measurable transcripts after 2 years - so no late relapses!