WEHI Wednesday Seminar hosted by Professor Warren Alexander
 

Professor Andrew Roberts

Laboratory Head & Theme Leader – Blood Cells & Blood Cancer division – Cancer Research & Treatments Theme, WEHI

Venetoclax for blood cancer: exploring beyond the headline approvals

 

Davis Auditorium

Join via SLIDO enter code #WEHIWednesday

Including Q&A session
 

Venetoclax is the first approved drug in a new class of anti-cancer drugs, BH3 mimetics, made possible by the discovery of the function of BCL2 and breakthrough research in cell death at WEHI. By specifically inhibiting BCL2, venetoclax directly triggers apoptosis without first damaging DNA or necessarily requiring TP53 function. First approved for selected patients with chronic lymphocytic leukaemia (CLL) in 2016, it is now a standard-of-care treatment for both CLL and acute myeloid leukaemia globally. However, there is still much to learn about what the drug is, and is not, capable of for treatment of these and other blood cancers. Andrew Roberts is an academic pioneer in venetoclax and BH3 mimetic research, both preclinical and clinical. He will present several vignettes illustrating what we know about resistance to BCL2 inhibition in patients and how we might go about circumventing this now with existing tools in investigator-initiated trials, and in the future after further discovery research.

All welcome!