2Nd Bologna Workshop On Immunotherapy For Acute Myeloid Leukemia

Acute Myeloid Leukemia (AML) is a heterogeneous clonal disease deriving from a rare population of bone marrow leukemic stem cells. Although new and potent drugs have recently entered the clinical stage, the 5-year patient overall survival is largely unsatisfactory, reaching 30% and dropping to 5-10% in the elderly. Therefore, there is an urgent and unmet need for effective new treatment modalities for AML.

In the last years, cancer immunotherapy is gaining much interest due to its unique characteristics, such as the absence of conventional drug resistance mechanisms and low grade of toxicity. In AML, the immunotherapy field is evolving and expanding. Immunological drugs, i.e. immune checkpoint inhibitors, have been tested in early clinical trials and monoclonal antibodies as well as adoptive immunotherapy strategies are under active investigation. Despite a strong rationale, the clinical results of these approaches have not been satisfactory, and several questions need to be answered for a full exploitation of immune interventions in AML. Among them, the immunological effects of current therapies, such as chemotherapy agents, IDH1 inhibitors, FLT3-inhibitors, hypomethylating agents, BCL2 inhibitors, the contribution of drivers gene mutations on the immune microenvironment and their relevance for immunotherapy are still poorly investigated.

The aim of the workshop is to discuss recent biological findings which strongly indicate the specificity of bone marrow immune microenvironment as a critical issue for an effective biology-driven development of immunotherapies in AML, and to provide novel insights to move a step forward by designing a new generation of combination clinical trials.