Myelodysplastic syndromes, or MDS, are a group of malignancies affecting blood cells. About half of MDS patients go on to develop acute myeloid leukemia (AML), which is the most common leukemia in adults. Together, these diseases affect nearly 16,000 Americans each year.
The incidence of MDS is expected to rise as the population ages. There’s no curative therapy for most patients with MDS. Although the five-year survival rate for AML has vastly improved since the 1970s, it’s still only less than 30%. In addition, half of AML and MDS patients will succumb to complications from their disease or treatment. Clearly, now is the time to find more effective therapies for both of these diseases.
MD Anderson’s AML/MDS Moon Shot will combine the latest treatment technologies and genetic knowledge to identify the most promising new treatments and move them into a clinical setting in a faster, more efficient way.
Identify a subset of patients with lower risk MDS that may benefit from early intervention due to predicted prognosis
More than 80% of our patients already are benefiting from ongoing clinical trials of novel targeted therapies, immunotherapies and stem cell transplantation. Other research avenues are actively being pursued for new studies.
Since 1970, MD Anderson has maintained an extensive research database for MDS and leukemia that contains data from more than 31,000 patients, and our tissue bank has 11,000 samples. This data has been instrumental in helping researchers worldwide understand the relationships between MDS and AML and develop drugs that target known genetic factors of these diseases.
