Every year, the American Society of Hematology (ASH) conference is an opportunity for the latest hematology research from around the world to be presented. Although conference presentations do not go through peer review (unlike journal articles), they do provide an opportunity to see what is coming down the research pipeline.
You can access 68 (!!) items that mention the word “macroglobulinemia” here. Of course, you may not want to look at all of them. So here are a very few, that we think may be of interest.
- First of all, we would be remiss if we did not point out the three presentations from Dr. Hunter’s work — as a reminder, this is looking like breakthrough research that you funded through your donations to the WMFC. On the ASH website, those three are here, here, and here — but you might be better off reading the non-technical summary he kindly supplied to us.
- The all-Canadian BRAWM trial, led by Dr. Berinstein, which has been presented to us several times, has its first interim status update. An interesting last line: “initial clinical results show all 8 patients who completed 6 cycles of BR and Acalabrutinib to date have achieved a VGPR”. 100% VGPR? Looking really good, but we’ll have to wait for more patients to work their way through the trial to see if that holds up.
- The clinical trial that our friend and member Ron Ternoway is participating in, is also reporting results. The conclusion includes “In this cohort of heavily pretreated R/R [relapsed or refractory] WM patients, pirtobrutinib was highly active, regardless of the pattern of prior therapy. The depth of response observed, as demonstrated by the favorable VGPR rate, is noteworthy in the subset of patients with prior covalent BTKi therapy.”
There is a lot to chose from — which is a good sign that WM is getting some attention in the research community. Your interests may differ from ours, so enjoy browsing through them! (Just do recall, these presentations are not yet peer reviewed.)