ASH 2025 | Real-world treatment duration of ruxolitinib and transfusion use in patients with myelofibrosis

This is actually a very interesting analysis. Of course, it’s retrospective. It’s using Medicare claims data, fee-for-service claims data from one of the large available databases. But what it’s really telling us is very interesting. One, the median duration that patients stayed on ruxolitinib is strikingly similar to what we saw in the COMFORT trials. There we saw between 3 and 3.2 years. Here it’s 3.1 years. Median follow-up, by the way, for this study is about four years. 

It was good to see that patients got started on Ruxolitinib fairly early, like in about median four and a half months from diagnosis, which is excellent because we know that if you start Ruxolitinib early, within 12 months of diagnosis, you have better survival and generally better response rate. So that was good to see. 

And then one thing that was really intriguing is that, you know, we have this sense that Ruxolitinib is not a good drug for anemia, in fact, causes anemia, that’s actually extremely well known, but what was seen in this study is that of the minority of patients who were transfusion-dependent at baseline, many of them actually became independent at the end of one year, so the only way I would explain that is we know Ruxolitinib does not necessarily help anemia per se, in fact, it causes some, like I said, but one would imagine that because of spleen reduction and overall disease improvement, that the anemia got better in these patients. 

So I think from those perspectives, one, it gives us increased confidence about the duration of Ruxolitinib, same as the COMFORT trials, like I said, it was good to see the early initiation, and it was a pleasant surprise to see that some of these transfusion-dependent individuals were able to become independent.

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