Clinical Trials Continue to Evaluate Menin Inhibitors for Leukemia

Eytan M. Stein, MD, chief of the leukemia service and director of the Program for Drug Development in Leukemia, Division of Hematologic Malignancies, at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, New York, discusses trials evaluating Menin inhibitors for patients with acute leukemia and unmet needs that persist in the space.

Menin inhibitors have continued to show impact for patients with leukemia, including in a challenging patient population of individuals with acute leukemia with KMT2A rearrangements.

Findings from multiple trials, such as the phase 1/2 AUGMENT-101 study (NCT04065399) of revumenib (SNDX-5613; Syndax) in patients with relapsed/refractory KMT2A-rearranged or NPM1-mutant acute leukemia or the phase 1/2 KOMET-001 trial (NCT04067336) of ziftomenib have already reported promising results with these therapies.

Further studies are ongoing and investigating Menin inhibitors with standard-of-care regimens for acute leukemia in the frontline, according to Stein in a presentation on the topic at the 11th Annual Meeting of the Society of Hematologic Oncology.

Transcription:

0:10 | There are a whole bunch of clinical trials that are starting. Some of those are combining Menin inhibitors with standard-of-care treatments that we already have for acute leukemia. I think those will be practice changing. I think that there's a very good chance that by adding Menin inhibitors to intensive chemotherapy and other standard-of-care therapies that we're going to see better responses than what we see.

0:30 | Now, the other thing that's happening is the combination of Menin inhibitors with small molecules, other small molecules, like FLT3 inhibitors. And the reason people are doing that is because there seems to be a number of patients who have co-occurring mutations between FLT3 and KMT2A. Therefore, doing a combination study like that makes a lot of sense. I'm quite hopefiul that all of these trials will lead to better outcomes for the patients who are being treated.

1:04 | Right now, there's a huge unmet need, because these patients really don't do very well. Their overall survival at 5 years is probably in the range of 30%. So that's 1. The whole field of this mutation is an unmet need. But then, 1 of the unmet needs with Menin inhibitors specifically is figuring out how to overcome this resistance.