The Expanding Role of Minimal Residual Disease Testing in Acute Myeloid Leukemia
Christopher Hourigan, MD, PhD, Virginia Tech Fralin Biomedical Research Institute Cancer Research Center, Washington, DC, reviews the most recent high-impact developments in measurable residual disease (MRD) testing in acute myeloid leukemia (AML), focusing on key updates from recent months.
He highlights the new European Leukemia Net MRD guidelines, important long-term data on monitoring and intervention, key ASH abstracts, and future directions for integrating MRD into clinical care.
Transcript:
Hi, I'm Professor Chris Hourigan. I'm Director of the Virginia Tech Fralin Biomedical Research Institute Cancer Research Center in Washington, DC. And I'm here at the 2026 LLM Winter Symposium. I'm here to talk about AML MRD, which is the only focus of mine. But really what I talked about at this meeting was some of the very latest developments.
And so I really restricted my talk and my comments here to the last 2 months. And so, there's been a lot of things happening in AML MRD. I spent all my time thinking about AML MRD and it's been hard for me to keep up. So I really tried to condense that down to high yield things that you may have missed over the past two months because so much new information has been coming down about MRD testing in AML. And so I focused on really 3 big things.
One is there is new European Leukemia Net AML MRD guidelines. These are the consensus international standard of care guidelines for MRD testing. It's the third iteration. They were released in late December in blood. They're available online and I took through the high level things that clinicians need to know about those guidelines now. There's many details in the extensive supplement, but I just tried to focus on the key takeaways of those new clinical care guidelines. Typically, they get integrated into other guidelines over time.
The second thing I spoke about was some new, very important publications that have come from studies that have been going on for quite some time now, so both long-term follow-up and integrative analysis of long-term studies of MRD testing in AML and what it means for both monitoring and also for intervention.
And the third thing I went through is the abstract at ASH and tried to give some of my take on what the significance of those abstracts are in the broader picture and how in the future it's going to be integrated into future the ways we use MRD testing.
As a bonus, I gave my tip of what I think the field's going to look like in the 2027 and 2028. But that was the main issue was that the things are moving so fast, trying to boil it down to what you need to know for MRD testing in AML.
Source:
Hourigan C. Presented at Lymphoma, Leukemia & Myeloma Winter Symposium; January 30-February 1, 2026. Amelia Island, Fl.
