ASH 2023 | The current landscape of immunotherapy for AML: an update from ASH 2023

So immunotherapy has remained something of extreme interest for patients with AML and for clinical investigators looking to find ways to leverage the patient’s immune system. The gold standard, or what we always think about when we say immunotherapy works, is we always think about transplantation. Allogeneic transplantation remains the only curative modality for AML outside of core binding factor AML, which can be cured with chemo alone. But for the overwhelming majority of patients, in order to be cured, you need a transplant, and that is leveraging the immune system to try to stimulate something called graft-versus-leukemia or graft-versus-tumor effect. So we know that there is activity with leveraging or regulating the immune system to improve or make responses more durable.

We are in the process of still studying antibody-drug conjugates, looking at different cell surface markers, trying to still find a way to use CAR-T cells in AML, so we could hopefully one day keep up and catch up with our lymphoid colleagues. But in the meantime we’re starting to look into additional arenas. There are a lot of interesting drugs, such as NK cell engagers. There are multiple immunotherapies that are targeting more than one cell surface marker. So I do think that there is hope for us to use immunotherapy beyond the traditional checkpoints, beyond transplantation. We’re looking at other modalities to leverage the immune system.