Yocum Discusses Updated Data From the Beat AML Master Trial

Ashley Yocum, PhD, executive research strategy lead at the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society, discusses the Beat AML trial (NCT03013998) of biomarker-based treatments in acute myeloid leukemia (AML).

The precision medicine master trial has been open for 7 years and works by assigning patients with newly diagnosed or relapsed or refractory AML to receive a biomarker-specific treatment within 7 days. This is based on targeted genomic sequencing in cytogenetics.

According to Yocum, data presented at the 2023 American Society of Hematology Annual Meeting demonstrated there to be pre-treatment factors of genetics that predetermine what kind of treatments patients receive.

Transcription:

0:10 | Beat AML has been open for 7 years and we have collected a lot of data during this time. We have had 1400 patients enrolled under the master trial and assigned a biomarker specific treatment. Not all the patients go on to a biomarker-specific treatment. Some in there were treated off protocol. So for these patients, we record what treatment they received off Beat AML and their overall survival. For the analysis that we [presented] at ASH this year, we looked at data collected from November 2018, for when venetoclax and azacitidine received accelerated FDA approval. We wanted to look at how that changed the landscape of how patients were assigned treatment.

0:56 | We took these patients, and there were 468, and we split them up into 3 different treatment categories. The first was venetoclax with any hypomethylating agent, the second was intensive chemotherapy, and the third was non-intensive treatment. What we saw was that there are pre-treatment demographics and features of genetics that predetermine what kind of treatments they receive.

1:23 | Patients who have core binding factors received intensive chemotherapy. Younger patients received intensive chemotherapy more frequently later than the others. Patients who had a poor performance score or an increased performance score, as well as increased liver enzymes, including [aspartate transaminase] and [alanine transaminase], also received the non-intensive treatments. Based on this, we also saw that people who had TP53 or complex karyotype more frequently received the non-intensive treatment.