ASH officially started early Saturday Dec. 5th with a fireside chat between ASH president, Dr. Stephanie Lee and Dr. Anthony Fauci the director of the NIH’s NIAID (National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases) since 1984.
Dr. Fauci have been at NIAID since the beginning of the HIV crisis, and during that time, nothing has come close to the challenge of the present COVID-19 pandemic.
He shares his recommendation that immunosuppressed patients with blood cancers, like us, get the vaccine, because some immunity is better than none. He is confident that we can crush COVID-19, but it won’t be quick, and it will require getting billions of doses of the vaccine to everyone, all around the world.
As to CLL research, there were dozens of posters on new therapies and deep dives into the biology of CLL, great education on managing the adverse events of novel agents, new research on how venetoclax effect cells beyond CLL, a promising new concept on how to treat Richter’s Transformation, but for my daily video I chose to focus on the four oral presentations on the latest clinical trial news about limited duration therapies, all of which included venetoclax. We covered the CAPTIVATE, CLARITY, MURANO and CLL14 trials.
Please enjoy some of the highlights from ASH’s official first day. I will be reporting daily and then we will be digging much deeper over the next several months.
Thanks for watching.
Stay strong. We are all in this together.
Brian Koffman