Dr. Garcia-Manero on Curing Patients With MDS and AML

Guillermo Garcia-Manero, MD, professor of Medicine, chief, Section of Myelodysplastic Syndromes, in the Department of Leukemia, Division of Cancer Medicine, The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, discusses the potential of curing patients with myelodysplastic syndromes (MDS) and acute myeloid leukemia (AML). Garcia-Manero explained this reasoning in an interview during the 2016 OncLive State of the Science Summit on Treatment of Hematologic Malignancies.

Over the next decade, researchers will be putting in a lot of effort to gain a better understanding of the various subsets of patients with MDS and AML, Garcia-Manero explains. As researchers are discovering that these diseases are very heterogeneous, he adds that now targeted therapies are becoming available to improve outcoems for these particular patients. While MDS was previoiusly believed to be 1 disease, he adds, it is now thought to be made up of 20 diseases.

Additionally, while Garcia-Manero cautions that he might be too optimistic by believing these diseases have curative potential, great progress is going to be made in the field over the next several years. These advances will lead to patients having a significant improvement in overall survival. At academic institutions such as The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, there are a number of ongoing clinical trials looking at such areas.

However, a major issue in the oncology community is that there are a significant number of patients who are unable to be treated at such an institution for a number of reasons.