ASH News Daily 2012 - Monday, December 10, 2012 - (Page A-1)

ASH NewS DAily ® 54th Annual Meeting of the American Society of Hematology Read this issue online at www.hematology.org/ashnewsdaily2012_monday Schedule 9:00 – 10:00 a.m. E. Donnall Thomas Lecture Speaker: Timothy J. Ley, MD Hall B5, Level 1, Building B 10:30 a.m. – 12:00 noon Education Spotlight Sessions (ticketed sessions) Various locations 1:30 – 2:30 p.m. Ernest Beutler Lecture Speakers: Bruce R. Blazar, MD, and Carl H. June, MD Hall B5, Level 1, Building B 2:45 – 4:15 p.m. Education Spotlight Sessions (ticketed sessions) Various locations A look ahead to Tuesday, December 11 7:15 – 9:15 a.m. Special Symposium on the Basic Science of Hemostasis and Thrombosis (invited presentations) Georgia Ballroom 3, Level 3, Building C 7:30 – 9:00 a.m. Late-Breaking Abstracts Session Hall B5, Level 1, Building B 9:30 – 9:45 a.m. Announcement of the Dameshek Prize and the Stratton Medal Hall B5, Level 1, Building B 9:45 – 11:15 a.m. Presidential Symposium Hall B5, Level 1, Building B 12:00 – 1:00 p.m. Best of ASH Sidney Marcus Auditorium, Level 4, Building A Curing Acute Promyelocytic Leukemia: Farewell to Chemotherapy By JoSe A. Bufill, Md he treatment of acute promyelocytic leukemia (APL) has evolved rapidly since the 1980s, when hematologists began T to acknowledge that the traditional 7+3 regimen was inadequate for this distinctive and deadly type of myeloid leukemia. Thus began a 30year movement away from empiric, chemotherapy-based approaches “I set before you today the audacious challenge: Is it possible to create a stroke-free generation of children with sickle cell disease that we can work on together?” Gary H. Gibbons, MD, Director of National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, asked of the audience during his remarks before the Plenary Scientific session on Sunday afternoon. and toward targeted therapy, a trend driven by serendipity and rationality, and by exemplary international cooperation among basic and clinical scientists. First, Chinese investigators in the late 1980s reported remarkable remissions in patients with refractory APL treated with all-trans-retinoic acid (ATRA). Basic scientists soon discovered that ATRA, used empirically at first as a traditional Chinese medicine, directly targets the molecular alteration that defines APL. Maturation arrest in APL results from the generation of a fusion protein born of the reciprocal translocation of the PML and RARA genes on chromosomes 15 and 17, respectively (OMIM 180240), and ATRA degrades this fusion protein. A few years later, investigators in China, the United States, and France observed that arsenic trioxide, another traditional Chinese remedy, could induce second remissions after failure of ATRA, a phenomenon »» APL Page A-4 A Map of Chronic Lymphocyctic Leukemia By JennA d. GoldBerG C IN THIS SECTION Myeloproliferative Diseases A-3 Ernst Beutler Lecture A-8 Hematology Course Directors Workshop A-12 AML A-18 hronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL), like other leukemias, acquires new mutations as the disease progresses. Recent work in acute myeloid leukemia (AML) has illustrated that some of these mutations can act as “driver” mutations that are present in founding clones and subclones. There is still much we don’t know about the implications of these mutations. In abstract 5, presented at yesterday’s Plenary session, Dan-Avi Landau, MD, Yale University, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, and Broad Institute, utilized a novel strategy to ask if acquisition of driver mutations that lead to the development of a subclone affects prognosis. Dr. Landau performed research in immunology and cell therapy at the Universite Pierre et Marie Curie in Paris. He transitioned to the United States in 2007 and completed his internship and residency in internal medicine at Yale University continuing on at Yale for a hematology and oncology fellowship. Dr. Landau is working toward a PhD in hematologic neoplasia at Universite Denis Diderot/University of Paris. While still a clinical fellow at Yale, he is also pursuing a postdoctoral fellowhip at the Broad Institute and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. In his career, Dr. Landau has had many notable achievements, including the 2011 ASH Research Training Award for Fellows and a three-year American Cancer Society Postdoctoral Fellowship Award. In this study, Dr. Landau and his colleagues completed a large-scale analysis of point mutations and copy- Dr. Landau presents his work on whole-exome sequencing in CLL. number alterations in 149 samples of CLL detected by whole-exome sequencing and single-nucleotide polymorphism arrays. They characterized mutations as being either clonal or subclonal based on computational techniques. Interestingly, »» CLL Page A-18  http://www.hematology.org/ashnewsdaily2012_monday

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of ASH News Daily 2012 - Monday, December 10, 2012

ASH News Daily 2012 - Monday, December 10, 2012

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