Dr Ruben Mesa on Fedratinib's Impact on Health-Related Quality of Life in Myelofibrosis

Research has shown that fedratinib favorably impacts health-related quality of life for patients with myelofibrosis across the board, said Ruben Mesa, MD, director of UT Health San Antonio MD Anderson Cancer Center.

Transcript

According to JAKARTA, how does fedratinib impact health-related quality of life for these patients? And does it impact patients differently based on fibrosis grade, spleen volume, or other factors?

Fedratinib is a JAK-2 inhibitor that is now approved for the therapy of patients with mild fibrosis. And what I presented at this meeting [61st American Society of Hematology Annual Meeting & Exposition] was a further analysis of our information both from the randomized study of the use of fedratinib and the upfront setting as well as in the second line setting.

So, what we observed is that fedratinib really can have a very significant favorable impact on health-related quality of life, both demonstrated by the improvement in symptoms, but also we had looked at other metrics of quality of life both the EQ [EuroQol]-5D in the JAKARTA study as well as the EORTC [European Organisation for Research and Treatment of Cancer] QLQ-C30, as well as a Patient Global Impression of Change in the JAKARTA-2 study. So, all of these, kind of, additional metrics show that in addition to improvement in symptoms, that really leads to a net improvement in the quality of life.

And we also looked at subset analysis to see was there a particular group that receives the benefit or, flipping it around, is there particular group that does not receive the benefit in terms of symptom improvement. Fortunately, we saw pretty much across the board, most patients have an improvement in their symptoms, regardless of fibrosis grade, regardless of their platelet count—whether that be 50 to 100 or above 100—regardless of baseline spleen size, or the presence of anemia. So, we're glad that there's that broad benefit, and then that it can help to improve health-related quality of life in myelofibrosis patients.