The emergence of non-steroid treatments is “one of the most exciting develops” for patients with GVHD in recent years, Jeanne M. Palmer, MD, told OncLive earlier this month.

Palmer, a hematologist and oncologist in the Bone Marrow Transplant Program at Mayo Clinic, said advances made with non-steroid treatments have shown promising activity.

She said, according to OncLive:

The Mount Sinai Acute GVHD International Consortium, is a group led by James L. Ferrara, MD, DSc, who has done an amazing amount of work in this field. This has looked at different biomarkers at GVHD diagnosis and at different time points after starting therapy for the disease. Several different timepoints can be looked at in that setting. The first one would be at initiation of GVHD. What these biomarkers aim to do is add to the clinical risk that is assessed and make it more granular in saying who is at risk of having more or less treatment-related mortality. This leads to the idea of avoiding steroids and using other medications because if you can appropriately assess risk, you might be able to determine which patients this might be appropriate for. Using biomarkers at that time to determine how the treatment should go is not quite at primetime, but it’s a really interesting concept and one that I’m looking forward to seeing the development of.

Read the full interview on OncLive.

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