EHA 2026 | The hottest updates in MPNs from EHA 2026

Yeah, a lot at the oral sessions particularly. So, I would say maybe four or five things come to mind just real quick. So, Ajax, AJ1-11095 is a type 2 JAK2 inhibitor and these are the first results. So, that’s incredibly exciting. This is again the first of its kind, type 2. All the others are type 1. And the type 2s are able to overcome persistence, which is a mechanism of resistance to the type 1s. So these will be the first results of the Ajax study in post-type 1 JAK inhibitor treated patients. And so some of the response rates are really unprecedentedly high. And we might be, you know, entering a new era in terms of setting a new high bar for spleen and symptom responses with this drug. So that’s one. 

Then, you know, we have an update on the Incyte Mutant CALR antibody that’s been very exciting for some time now, starting with last year’s EHA and then ASH. So Mutant CALR is the driver mutation in about a quarter of patients with ET and MF. And so more data on that, updated analyses. It improves spleen, symptoms and anemia in MF. The CALR VAF goes down. So that’s one of the most exciting drugs around. 

And then we have also the much-awaited results of INDEPENDENCE. So this is the phase three pivotal trial of Luspatercept in transfusion-dependent patients with myelofibrosis on a stable dose of a JAK inhibitor. So we had some top-line results come out last July, but it’s actually being presented for the first time here. So that’s definitely much awaited because Luspatercept is already widely used, but not approved for MF. It’s approved for MDS, and we all use it. It’s a good drug. It works safe and helps with anemia. But it will be interesting to see the, you know, the full phase three analysis. 

Systemic mastocytosis, a lot of excitement about bezuclastinib. We heard at ASH the results of the SUMMIT trial in non-advanced SM. This year at EHA, the results of the APEX trial in advanced SM. So those will be the first results there. We know that avapritinib is approved in that space, actually in both advanced and indolent, but now this could be the year that leads to the approval of bezuclastinib based on these trials in non-advanced and advanced. Of course, that remains to be seen, but these are the first results of the APEX trial. 

And finally, there’s a drug called DISC-0974. This is an anti-hemojuvilin antibody that is also being presented at an oral session here at EHA. We’ve heard these updates that actually as recently as like 10 days ago at ASCO, but this is an anemia drug for myelofibrosis where you can study it alone or it’s being studied alone as well as in combination with all four of the approved JAK inhibitors. So this seems like a really potent, safe, effective drug for anemia in terms of both transfusion independence and just hemoglobin improvement. So I would say those are my top five for the orals this year at EHA. 

Also, and this is not completely novel anymore because it was at ASCO as a late breaker, is the late breaking abstract at EHA of the SENTRY trial, which was a frontline trial of ruxolitinib and selinexor versus ruxolitinib and placebo in JAK inhibitor naive patients with myelofibrosis. So something like 350 patients. And really why this is really important is that apart from increasing the spleen response rate quite a bit over ruxolitinib alone, it was something like 50 versus 28. But much more importantly, there was a survival advantage seen as early as 12 months where selinexor and ruxolitinib, you know, had a hazard ratio of something like 0.43 for survival and a p-value of 0.022. And this is remarkable because this is the first combination to show a survival benefit over ruxolitinib alone in myelofibrosis. We’ve had other combinations studied in large phase threes where we’ve not seen this. So the regulatory path forward for Selinexor, of course, remains to be determined, remains to be seen, but these are exciting data.

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