Treatment of CML continues to progress

Dasatinib and nilotonib both result in lower rates of anemia and neutropenia than imatinib. Imatinib therapy still has the lowest occurrence of thrombocytopenia.

With all these new developments and less than 10 years of data to go on, Dr O’Brien brought up some issues physicians should consider when choosing frontline therapy for CML, including the relevance of short-term endpoints, the difficulty of assessing survival differences among developing therapies, the cost of drugs, and the spectrum of toxicities.