News Details

NCCN Updates Chronic Myelogenous Leukemia Guidelines

Significant new treatment added

JENKINTOWN, Pa., October 3, 2006 — The National Comprehensive Cancer Network (NCCN) is proud to announce several new updates to the NCCN Clinical Practice Guidelines in Oncology TM for Chronic Myelogenous Leukemia (CML). These changes highlight leading developments in the treatment of CML and represent the recognized standard for clinical policy in oncology in both the community and the academic practice settings.

A panel of world-renowned experts added Dasatinib (Sprycel, Bristol-Myers Squibb) to the guideline. Dasatinib, a new tyrosine kinase inhibitor, is approved by the FDA for the treatment of adults with chronic, accelerated, or myeloid or lymphoid blast phase chronic myeloid leukemia with resistance or intolerance to prior therapy, including imatinib. It is also approved for Philadelphia-chromosome positive acute lymphoblastic leukemia.

The NCCN guidelines include dasatinib as a treatment recommendation at specific follow-up evaluation periods for patients that relapse or did not respond to imatinib therapy, or who have disease progression on imatinib therapy.

The panel also added indications for cytogenetics and mutation analysis for patients receiving imatinib therapy and an 18-month follow-up evaluation with treatment recommendations based upon cytogenetic response.

NCCN Clinical Practice Guidelines in OncologyTM are developed and updated through a consensus-driven process with explicit review of the scientific evidence by multidisciplinary panels of expert physicians from NCCN member institutions. The most recent version of this and all the guidelines are available for free at www.nccn.org.