Cancer treatment is undergoing significant developments and entering the new golden era of genomics which has true potentials for the promise of personalized medicine. Large-scale sequencing is changing our understanding of malignant disorders particularly acute myeloid leukemia.

Two recent reports show that the prognosis of MDS patients after secondary failure of hypomethylating drugs is poor, and switching from one failing hypomethylating drug to another cannot induce clinically significant responses.

There has been an ongoing debate about the role of ATG in reduced intensity conditioning (RIC) HSCT, and there are still bone marrow transplant centers that use ATG in the RIC setting, and their main argument is that ATG could help with engraftment and reducing the risk of GVHD.

A recent case report in the New England Journal of Medicine highlights the promising potentials of adoptive T-cell immunotherapy by redirecting them, through chimeric antigen receptors, as a novel and effective therapeutic modality for cancer.

Equine ATG has been used for the treatment of severe aplastic anemia since the 1980s. Rabbit ATG is used in many parts of the world including South America, Japan, and European countries. The results of a randomized study of equine versus rabbit ATG showed that rabbit ATG was inferior to equine ATG.

Is it time to revisit the therapeutic role of interferon alfa2 (IFN-α-2) in early myelofibrosis (MF) since new data show promising results?

The current dogma considers CMV seropositivity being associated with inferior outcomes HSCT. However, there has been a notion of “virus-versus-leukemia” effect since the 1980s.