ESH Erythro 2025 | Potential therapeutic avenues being explored to target inflammation in thalassemia & SCD

We are still a little bit behind in understanding how to deal with inflammation in sickle cell disease and beta-thalassemia. Of course, certain avenues have been explored, such as using some antibodies targeting inflammatory cytokines that are produced and released in excess in patients with sickle cell disease and beta-thalassemia, antibodies such as canakinumab that target interleukin-1-beta. However, of course, this is a disease with a very complex inflammatory background, so multiple cytokines play a role in these diseases, so we will need to target them in a more complex manner. And maybe we still miss some targeted therapies that specifically reduce the inflammatory activation of certain cells, ranging from neutrophils to monocytes, macrophages, and vascular cells. So, I really believe that this will be a good avenue to pursue in the next decades and find more specific compounds, molecules, and targeted therapies that can deliver certain drugs to specifically, let’s say, switch off inflammation driven by specific cells. And indeed, in the lab, we are working in this direction, hopefully trying to target better the macrophage. So we do not have available good strategies to target macrophages in different tissues, and we are trying to achieve this just with the aim to switch off the specific cell type. Hopefully this will be doable in the next years and see how much this will improve the inflammation overall in these diseases and also the complications associated with them.

This transcript is AI-generated. While we strive for accuracy, please verify this copy with the video.