Free symposium offers expert insights on CAD diagnosis, treatment
The session will be held live and virtually today ahead of the annual ASH meeting
A free symposium on complement cascade-targeted treatment approaches for cold agglutinin disease (CAD) will be held live and virtually today ahead of the 2023 American Society of Hematology (ASH) meeting taking place in San Diego, California, Dec. 9-12.
Announced in a tweet earlier this week, the session titled “Advances in Autoimmune Hemolytic Anemia: Targeting the Complement Cascade in Cold Agglutinin Disease” will be one of six educational sessions in a full-day of symposia related to advancements in blood diseases.
The CAD symposium will be held from 3:30 to 5:30 p.m. PST in the San Diego Ballroom AB at the Marriott Marquis, and via virtual simulcast. Free registration is available on the event website. The symposium is not an official event of the ASH meeting and ASH registration is not required to attend.
Featured speakers in the CAD session will include Catherine M. Broome, MD, associate professor at Georgetown University in Washington D.C., David Dingli, MD, PhD, professor at the Mayo Clinic College of Science and Medicine in Minnesota, and Deva Sharma, MD, assistant professor at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Tennessee.
After a welcome and introductions, these experts will talk about CAD’s causes, types, and diagnostic criteria, with insights into the existing challenges when making a diagnosis.
The discussion then will move toward CAD treatments, including historical and current approaches for managing the rare disease. Particularly, a focus will be on therapies that work to suppress the immune complement pathway.
In CAD, the immune system wrongfully attacks the body’s red blood cells at cold temperatures, promoting their destruction. The complement pathway, a cascade of signaling proteins that work to boost immune responses against potential threats, is implicated in CAD-associated red blood cell destruction.
Sanofi’s Enjaymo (sutimlimab-jome), the first and only approved treatment for CAD, is an antibody that works to block complement activation by targeting the C1 complement protein.
What’s next for CAD treatment?
The experts will discuss what’s coming next for CAD treatment. Therapies targeting the active form of C1 or other complement proteins also are in development for CAD, including Sanofi’s possible successor to Enjaymo called SAR445088.
This discussion will include a spotlight on current clinical trial data being presented at the ASH conference.
Other sessions today will concern certain blood cancers as well as well as light chain amyloidosis, a rare disease in which certain immune cells produce excess proteins that misfold and clump to toxic levels in the body.
Refreshments will be offered throughout the day at the in-person event, which is being hosted by the National Comprehensive Cancer Network in partnership with Clinical Care Options. More support comes via educational grants from a number of pharmaceutical companies, including Sanofi.
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