Staying Up to Date on the Latest Advancements Across Hematologic Oncology

In March 2026, Baptist Health hosted the Seventh Annual Miami Cancer Institute Immunotherapies Summit for Hematologic Malignancies, an event dedicated to unraveling the evolving therapeutic standards in the management of different hematologic malignancies. Following the summit, Guenther Koehne, MD, the symposium director, spoke with CancerNetwork^® about key ideas that emerged from the presentations.

The theme of this meeting and beyond, said Koehne, was staying on top of the evolving hematologic oncology field and continuing to learn how the standard of care has shifted over time. He noted that novel immunotherapies have induced better outcomes for patients while harboring adverse effect profiles that compare favorably vs chemotherapy, which has previously conferred limited quality of life. Looking ahead, Koehne stated that maintaining therapeutic outcomes with new immunotherapies while protecting “good quality of life” should be a focus in the field.

Koehne is deputy director and chief of Blood and Marrow Transplant, Hematologic Oncology and Benign Hematology at Miami Cancer Institute.

Transcript:

My personal recommendation to healthcare providers would be—and that’s the theme of this meeting and beyond—stay on top of the developments and continue to learn [how] the new standard of care has rapidly and significantly changed over the last few years. That’s one of the take-home messages: that you do not miss out on the novel treatment approaches, which induce a better outcome. But as I mentioned with the immunotherapies, yes, they have [adverse] effects, but they are all controllable. Those [adverse] effects don’t compare to what patients had to go through with chemotherapy a few years ago and had to recover [with] a limited quality of life for a long period. That has changed significantly. It’s not necessary only to improve outcomes. If you have a good outcome already, then the focus should be, "How can we maintain the outcome with good quality of life?"

Reference

Miami Cancer Institute Immunotherapies Summit for Hematologic Malignancies, Seventh Annual. Baptist Health. Accessed March 16, 2026. https://tinyurl.com/mpntcth2