Just some helpful context here for those reading your comment: this trial was done on patient with relapsed AML (it came back after having gone away) or refractory AML (meaning the cancer never actually got to remission). The standard treatment for relapsed/refractory acute leukemia is a bone marrow transplant, which is pretty toxic (more so than most standard chemo). Success rates of transplant are much better if you can get in remission prior to transplant. So having a drug that can help get people into remission is a big step forward.
Regarding the outcomes mentioned, there are many ways to try and measure if someone is in remission. Morphological remission just means when they looked at the bone marrow under the microscope, they didn’t see leukemia cells. The better measure of remission is MRD (Minimal Residual Disease), which is a test using a different method called flow cytometry that looks at individual cells and the markers they produce to find cancer cells. If MRD is negative, that’s considered better than morphological remission.
bigwill6709 t1_jd66ywp wrote
Reply to comment by JamesIgnatius27 in Promising pill completely eliminates cancer in 18 leukaemia patients by mancinedinburgh
Just some helpful context here for those reading your comment: this trial was done on patient with relapsed AML (it came back after having gone away) or refractory AML (meaning the cancer never actually got to remission). The standard treatment for relapsed/refractory acute leukemia is a bone marrow transplant, which is pretty toxic (more so than most standard chemo). Success rates of transplant are much better if you can get in remission prior to transplant. So having a drug that can help get people into remission is a big step forward.
Regarding the outcomes mentioned, there are many ways to try and measure if someone is in remission. Morphological remission just means when they looked at the bone marrow under the microscope, they didn’t see leukemia cells. The better measure of remission is MRD (Minimal Residual Disease), which is a test using a different method called flow cytometry that looks at individual cells and the markers they produce to find cancer cells. If MRD is negative, that’s considered better than morphological remission.