As of recently, different areas in the treatment of acute myelogenous leukemia (AML) have seen a lot of progress such as allogeneic bone marrow transplantation, prognostic factors, and new and targeted therapies. There has been an improvement in determining risk due to the description and elucidation of prognostic factors, and research is proceeding from cytogenetics to an assessment of molecular markers. Adoption of reduced-intensity conditioning is one of the trends falling under the area of allogeneic bone marrow transplantation in spite of the absence of comparative studies. It has been viewed as a practical choice owing to the dominance of information, but prospective studies need to establish a genuine comprehension of the amount of benefit it passes on. Another development is the utilization of alternative donors and recent information is promising. However, in case the patient goes through the transplantation while the disease is active, survival chances happen to be very poor, particularly during the refractory relapse or refractory disease. Survival rates of patients with haploidentical matched donors and patients with matched unrelated-donor transplants are found to be alike. Upon assessing the information for allogeneic transplantation, it was noted that, in comparison to HLA-identical sibling transplants to patients in later remissions, the highest possibility of survival in the long-term was provided by HLA-identical sibling transplants to patients in the first complete remission (CR1). Likewise, a greater extent of success is noted in the unrelated-donor transplants to patients with high risk in CR1 to those in CR2 or later remission. It has also been established that hematopoietic transplantation in AML has an appropriate source in cord blood. New and targeted therapies are the third area of progress in recent developments. Several new agents with huge potential are in development as well as clinical trials. Therapy can also be customized to various particular genetic subtypes of AML.
Link:theoncologist.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1634/theoncologist.12-S2-14
