Addressing Treatment Needs for Polycythemia Vera

Ghaith Abu-Zeinah, MD, a hematologist, an oncologist at Weil Cornell Medicine, discusses the unmet needs investigational drugs could address for patients with polycythemia vera (PV).

Ongoing studies are focused on the development of drugs that can lower blood counts and help maintain a stable hematocrit in patients, according to Abu-Zeinah. But what physicians do not know is whether the agents can prevent disease progression.

The next step in research may be to identify biomarkers to predict disease progression in patients with PV who are receiving certain therapies.

Transcription:

0:07 | There are some ongoing studies in PV. The biggest challenge in PV is that it's a chronic disease, which in a way is a good thing. We're not talking about terminal illness, or, you know, metastatic solid tumor. It is a chronic hematologic malignancy, where the median survival can be more than 20 years. And so, the biggest challenge is when developing new therapies is to actually know whether these therapies can prevent progression. That will require studies that really go on for a very, very long time.

0:42 |That being said, the current therapies that are being developed for PV are continuing to target some of the important end points of lowering blood counts, you know, maintaining a stable hematocrit, etc. But unfortunately, we still don't know whether some of the treatments that are being developed will prevent progression. And sometimes, time will tell but, on the other hand, it would be good to know earlier. And the sooner, the better. And so, for that reason, I do think, along with the studies that are ongoing, in PV, we need to figure out a way to be able to better predict the therapies that are going to prevent progression down the line, you know, 10-20 years down the line, starting from today.

1:29 | So, how do we do that? I think it's helpful to look into potential biomarkers for disease activity and biomarkers for disease-modifying modification scene with treatment. And that's actually an area of research that we're actively working on and interested in. And we actually had an abstract looking at [a] potential biomarker called MPN fitness at predicting some of these potential outcomes. So, I think pairing up some of the ongoing trials and research and PV with some biomarker endpoints that can potentially predict patients who are responding and who have are experiencing disease-modifying activity, I think is an exciting area of research in PV.