The annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO), the largest global cancer conference of the year, brings together the world’s leading cancer researchers to share the latest research data and clinical breakthroughs for all types of cancers.
During this media tour, Dr. Louis J. DeGennaro, President and CEO of The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society (LLS), the world’s largest blood cancer nonprofit organization, is joined by leukemia survivor Loriana Hernandez-Aldama, to discuss cancer advances emerging from the ASCO annual meeting and LLS’s innovative approach to treating a deadly cancer. Hernandez-Aldama will share her inspiring story of going from TV health reporter to patient, and her work to spread the word about the urgent need for better cancer treatments and cures.
Advances in the blood cancers – leukemia, lymphoma, multiple myeloma and other blood malignancies – which comprise approximately 10 percent of all new cancer cases diagnosed last year continue to be a key focus of the ASCO meeting, as new approaches to blood cancer therapy emerge with dizzying speed. Precision medicine, targeting the therapy to the patient’s individual genetic profile, and immunotherapy, harnessing the patient’s immune system to fight cancer, are drawing the most attention of the cancer community.
More than 1.2 million people are either living with or in remission from a blood cancer in the United States. And among the most deadly of all blood cancers is acute myeloid leukemia (AML), which kills more than 10,000 patients in the United States each year.
Loriana is one of those patients who is fortunate to have beaten the odds. When Loriana, a fitness and health reporter, was diagnosed with AML while undergoing fertility treatments to have a 2nd baby, she was shocked to learn that the standard therapies for AML had not changed in 40 years. But now she is eager to help other patients by raising awareness about how advances in technology, diagnostics and new experimental drugs in the pipeline may be changing this, and how The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society (LLS) is leading the way through a groundbreaking precision medicine clinical trial: the Beat AML Master Trial.
LLS has invested more than $1 billion in research to find cures for blood cancer patients, and this investment has played a role in advancing nearly every therapy used to treat blood cancer patients. The Beat AML Master Trial is one of LLS’s most important current initiatives.
