BPDCN: Future Directions in Care
Closing out their discussion on the management of blastic plasmacytoid dendritic cell neoplasm, expert panelists look toward the future treatment paradigm.
Transcript:
Naveen Pemmaraju, MD: James, what are your closing thoughts? Looking at the features of future directions for BPDCN [blastic plasmacytoid dendritic cell neoplasm] and related fields, what are your thoughts as you look at all these data?
James McCloskey, MD: To summarize, it keeps coming back to communication: talking to your colleagues, talking together, working together. One thing I’m always struck by is that a lot of times I get calls from folks in the community who see older, frail patients and look at them as not having options. It seems overwhelming to treat 1 of these frail, older patients. That’s completely true. Just like in AML, a lot of these therapies are tolerable in older patients. These are aggressive hematologic malignancies. If we don’t address them, they lead to a rapid decline in quality of life and quickly result in the patient’s death. The more work we can do together, both in the community and at large academic centers, the sooner we’re going to bring better treatments into this disease space for folks with this rare disease.
Naveen Pemmaraju, MD: Wow. I want to thank both of you for an illuminating discussion. I hope the audience feels the same way. On behalf of my friends and colleagues, Dr Alejandro Gru and Dr James McCloskey, I’m Dr Naveen Pemmaraju. I thank the Targeted Oncology™ Virtual Tumor Board® team for their help in getting us all together with my friends to discuss the state of BPDCN, but also some glimpses into our thoughts for future directions for clinical care and research. We hope today’s program was valuable for everyone, and that you acquired some practical knowledge that you can put into your clinical practice now and into the future. With that, thank you to the Targeted Oncology™ team. We’ll sign off for now. Be well. Thank you all very much.
Transcript edited for clarity.
