Transcript
Good afternoon. My name is Dr. Guenther Koehne. I am the Deputy Director of Miami Cancer Institute. I am also the Chief of the Marrow Transplant Program and Hematologic Malignancy Program at Miami Cancer Institute.
In addition, I am also the Chairman of the Department of Translational Medicine at Florida International University.
This is second time that we have a Miami Cancer Institute Summit of the Americas on Immunotherapies for Hematologic Malignancies.
The focus of this conference is how to best integrate novel developments, particularly of targeted therapies and immunotherapies, in the existing treatment, schedule, and plans that we have for patients with cancer, but particularly also for hematologic malignancies.
That goes from the whole variety of targeted agents that specifically interfere with the pathway of leukemia cells, for example, to specifically targeting surface molecules that are expressed on leukemia or non-Hodgkin lymphoma.
You will also hear a lot about specific targeting of multiple myeloma cells, which is a brand-new approach that also gets some headway and some real scientific interest.
All of this will be covered in this symposium. It will allow the participants to really get within the short time period of 3 hours and half or so a real good update on where we are.
I have world-class leaders in the field that update us on particularly leukemia and multiple myeloma and non-Hodgkin lymphoma.
Dr. Richard Stone, for example, from Dana-Farber Institute, will update us on high-risk acute myeloid leukemia treatments. That is, FLT3-positive AMLs that are known to be high risk. They can be treated now in combination with FLT3-inhibitors. There are other targeted agents like IDH1 and IDH2 inhibitors that we try to integrate effectively into the treatment of acute myeloid leukemia.
There is Dr. Wendy Stock from the University of Chicago. She will focus on the novel treatment approaches for acute lymphoblastic leukemia.
I'm particularly enthusiastic about new approaches. You will not believe this, but there is a chemotherapy-free induction approach for acute lymphoblastic leukemia, which has been historically the most aggressive chemotherapy combination for cancers. Now, we have chemotherapy-free induction approach that can lead to complete remissions, and those remissions can be minimal residual disease negative, which is another exciting part of this whole conference, to integrate the MRD status, or minimal residual disease status, into how to treat patients before transplant or after transplant.
These are two of the highlights: but (let’s) not forget about multiple myeloma.
Dr. Adam Cohen from the University of Pennsylvania will update us on how to target best multiple myeloma with specifically the B-cell maturation antigen, or in short BCMA.
My friend from Dana-Farber, Robert Soiffer, the Chief of Transplantation, will ask the question, “How does the existence of CAR-T cells affect allogenic stem cell transplantation?”
There's sub-entities of CAR-T cells. This will be highly interesting and innovative. As you know, we all call it CAR-T cells for chimeric antigen receptor T-lymphocyte treatment approaches. Now, we will hear for the first time that there are CARs that are not T cell directed. Now, we're going to other receptor cells.
Dr. Lin from MD Anderson will tell us about CAR-NK cells.
There are others, like monocytes now can be transduced with a CAR construct and can induce an immune response at the site of the tumor. We will get a really specific update on all the novel approaches.
Robert Sackstein, the Dean of Florida International University, developed a brand-new approach on how to modify CAR-T cells with a GPS. That is not the GPS as you know it in the car, but it's glycoprotein that allow to go straight to the area of tumors in the endothelial cells and get stuck at the area of the tumor site, and they migrate out, and they go straight to the tumor.
These all are hot topics, don't you think?
