Research at the University of Colorado Cancer Center

Daniel Pollyea, MD, MS
Historically, the outcomes for patients with this disease have been awful. This has been one of the most aggressive cancers known to man. Our research interests and our clinical operation all led us to a major breakthrough therapy for this disease. I'm Dan Pollyea. I'm an associate professor of medicine at the University of Colorado, in the Division of Hematology, Department of Medicine.

Acute myeloid leukemia, otherwise known as AML, is a type of a cancer that affects the bone marrow. The Bone Marrow you can think of is kind of like the factory that makes all the cells of the blood, by extension, affects every single organ and tissue in the body. This is a whole body disease. It's usually not eradicated with traditional, conventional chemotherapy, and it's the source of relapse when it occurs, which historically is pretty much always with this disease.

Dr. Craig Jordan is one of the world's experts in identifying and understanding the leukemia stem cell population. We agreed from a very early time period in our working relationship that we are going to develop something very unique here. It's not like where you've got two different teams in parallel that don't intersect, kind of coming up with their own ideas. Everybody is on the same page on this, and that's that's a very, very unique relationship between a laboratory team and a clinical team. Because of the understanding of the disease that has come from the laboratory based research, we are able to exploit specific weaknesses that are inherent in just the leukemia stem cell population so that we can treat a patient with a leukemia stem cell targeting therapy and get deep and durable remissions and potentially cure the disease.

When a clinical trial works, it's like a time machine, and you are transporting yourself into a future era where there are better therapies and you have access to them today. You see some of the most dramatic outcomes and 180 degree turnarounds in patients with AML routinely, going from literally death's door to potentially cured. My clinics have gone from a, you know, really kind of like somber place where we're having difficult conversations about end of life to pretty, you know, joyful places where people come to celebrate another month of not having leukemia. It's an amazing story, how we've gone from, you know, a disease that was so mysterious to one that is so well understood. The University of Colorado, Anschutz Medical Campus has been ground zero for these successes, where there's hope, there's possibilities, and where there isn't hope, there's nothing.