Aly Karsan, MD

MDS and AML are two types of serious blood cancers called leukemias, with low chances of survival. Doctors usually look at genetic changes to decide how to treat them, but other things can also affect how well the treatment works. Older MDS and AML patients often get a medicine called a hypomethylating agent (HMA), sometimes with another drug called venetoclax. But only a small number of people respond well to HMAs. So some people end up getting treatments they don’t really need, and also might have side effects. Unfortunately, there is no test that can tell which patients will improve with HMAs and which ones won’t. We have two main goals: (1) to make a test to predict who will respond well to HMAs, and (2) to find ways to make the cancer cells more likely to respond to the medicine. We hope that this test will help doctors to choose the best patients to receive HMAs. In the long‐term we hope to find a better way to treat those patients who don’t respond to HMAs. We hope this research will help patients by not having them take medicines that won’t work, so they don’t get unnecessary side effects. In this way, they can also immediately get a different medicine that might work. Ultimately, we hope the new medicines we discover will help improve survival for more patients with leukemia.