Entries by Kirsty LEE

Lower-risk MDS patients benefit from novel drug, imetelstat

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Myelodysplastic syndromes (MDS) are a heterogenous group of clonal haematopoietic disorders that carry a risk of progression to acute myeloid leukaemia (AML). Patients are stratified into risk groups due to the heterogeneity of the disease, which is also exemplified by median overall survival (OS) of 8.8 years for very low risk, and 0.8 years for very high risk patients. Due to symptoms such as anaemia, supportive red blood cell (RBC) transfusions are needed in 80-90% of patients during their disease course, although RBC dependence has been shown to be an adverse prognostic marker.

Carboplatin plus paclitaxel to be the new standard of care for anal cancer

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The incidence of anal cancer has been increasing over the past decade, but currently still constitutes 0.5% of all cancer diagnoses in the United States. When the cancer has metastasised, prognosis remains poor, with relative 5-year survival rates of approximately 30%. The current standard of care for metastatic anal cancer is cisplatin-based chemotherapy combined with 5-fluorouracil (5-FU). However, no randomised clinical trial investigating the optimal chemotherapy regimen for this disease has been conducted. The InterAAct trial was launched to investigate cisplatin plus FU against carboplatin plus paclitaxel in advanced anal cancers, and full results were recently published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology.