Tipifarnib for the Treatment of Older Patients With AML

Clinical Pearls

Harry Erba, MD, PhD, professor of medicine, director, Hematologic Malignancy Program, University of Alabama at Birmingham, discusses tipifarnib for the treatment of older, untreated patients with acute myeloid leukemia (AML).

• Tipifarnib is a farnesyltransferase inhibitor
• Tipifarnib was studied in older, untreated patients with AML in a large, randomized phase II study
• This study accrued 348 patients to four different treatment arms in 15 months
• At the start of the study, there was little data showing that tipifarnib was effective
• This study recapitulated prior work, which showed a 15-20% response rate with tipifarnib