Robert Hasserjian, MD, on Why the ICC Introduced an MDS, AML Overlap Group

Robert Hasserjian, MD, of Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, discusses a presentation on disease classification updates that he delivered during a Meet the Professor session at the Eleventh Annual Meeting of the Society of Hematologic Oncology.

Dr. Hasserjian discussed the International Consensus Classification (ICC) of acute myeloid leukemia (AML), which introduced an overlap category for AML and myelodysplastic syndromes (MDS). Sanam Loghavi, MD, discussed the World Health Organization classification system during the session and Andrew Wei, MBBS, PhD, spoke about reconciling the two systems in clinical management and research.

“I think the exciting thing that came out of this was that although there are some differences between the two classifications, they both are largely concordant in many aspects,” Dr. Hasserjian said. “For example, both are establishing and increasingly recognizing defined AML genetic groups that have been validated by clustering analyses that that look for specific disease classes.”

He spoke about the feedback and questions speakers received about the classification systems during the session.

“One thing that was emphasized is …clinical trials should ask pathologists to make sure that the trials are written with language that allows patients to enter classified by either classification,” he said. “I think that was part of the reason one of the entities introduced by the ICC is an overlap group of MDS/AML. The idea of that was to allow patients access to both MDS and AML therapies, and that’s something that Dr. Wei mentioned was an advantage.”

Dr. Hasserjian discussed a potential path to addressing this matter in clinical trials.

“In order for that to be effective, I think the trial sponsors and the pharmaceutical companies that develop trials need to consider that group and if appropriate, include those patients in their trial inclusion criteria,” he said.