Long-Term Outcomes of Imatinib Treatment for Chronic Myeloid Leukemia

By Andreas Hochhaus, R. Larson, F. Guilhot, J. Radich, S. Branford, T. Hughes, M. Baccarani, M. Deininger, F. Cervantes, Satoko Fujihara and 5 more. New England Journal of Medicine, 2017

1,052 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Background Imatinib, a selective BCR‐ABL1 kinase inhibitor, improved the prognosis for patients with chronic myeloid leukemia (CML). We conducted efficacy and safety analyses on the basis of more than 10 years of follow‐up in patients with CML who were treated with imatinib as initial therapy. Methods In this open‐label, multicenter trial with crossover design, we randomly assigned patients with newly diagnosed CML in the chronic phase to receive either imatinib or interferon alfa plus cytarabine. Long‐term analyses included overall survival, response to treatment, and serious adverse events. Results The median follow‐up was 10.9 years. Given the high rate of crossover among patients who had been randomly assigned to receive interferon alfa plus cytarabine (65.6%) and the short duration of therapy before crossover in these patients (median, 0.8 years), the current analyses focused on patients who had been randomly assigned to receive imatinib. Among the patients in the imatinib group, the estimated overall survival rate at 10 years was 83.3%. Approximately half the patients (48.3%) who had been randomly assigned to imatinib completed study treatment with imatinib, and 82.8% had a complete cytogenetic response. Serious adverse events that were considered by the investigators to be related to imatinib were uncommon and most frequently occurred during the first year of treatment. Conclusions Almost 11 years of follow‐up showed that the efficacy of imatinib persisted over time and that long‐term administration of imatinib was not associated with unacceptable cumulative or late toxic effects. (Funded by Novartis Pharmaceuticals; IRIS ClinicalTrials.gov numbers, NCT00006343 and NCT00333840.)

Subfields: Hematology, Molecular Biology, Rheumatology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/cc61775af2046795d56682dfb349dd1cc96624b2

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Hematology

  1. J. Cortes
  2. H. Kantarjian
  3. M. Baccarani
  4. Brian J. Druker

In Rheumatology

  1. J. Cortes
  2. H. Kantarjian
  3. M. Baccarani
  4. Brian J. Druker

Citations in the corpus