Insights Into Advancing Care and Research in Hairy Cell Leukemia

We sat down with Dr. Kerry A. Rogers for an interview at the Hairy Cell Leukemia Foundation 2025 Conference, hosted in Bologna, Italy. She shared her insights on the conference’s goals, the latest priorities in hairy cell leukemia research and how experts are working together to advance patient care.

Rogers is a hematologist-oncologist and she works as an associate professor of Internal Medicine in the Division of Hematology at the Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center (OSUCC) – James, where she is also a member of the Leukemia and Hematologic Malignancies Research Program.

Transcript

What are the key themes or goals of the Hairy Cell Leukemia Foundation 2025 Conference, and how do they reflect current priorities within the hairy cell leukemia research community?

I think this is, for many people, the best meeting of the year because it's where you get to get together with all your colleagues internationally who are part of this very special community in hairy cell leukemia. The main focuses have been on providing the best care for people living with hairy cell leukemia, and also trying to advance the research so that we can do better for people living with hairy cell leukemia.

Understanding how to better take care of patients and catching up with each other on research are the goals of the meeting every year. This has moved the mark in hairy cell leukemia because it is quite rare. But just to have everyone come together once a year and share ideas is usually the major goal.

We just had a nice session looking at issues of fertility and treating hairy cell in pregnancy. I think that's important because a lot of people with hairy cell leukemia are younger, a lot of people in their 30s and 40s, some maybe even their 20s, where having a family in the future is really important. And how to treat hairy cell leukemia during pregnancy, because it's rare, is not something we have a lot of information about or a lot of data.

I think that's a nice example of the power of this group, as we come together and discuss how we might answer some of these pressing questions that our patients have for us, that we don't have the information yet. There is a patient data registry, but it's very hard to capture information about who fathers children because it's not in the medical record. Some pregnancy data is. Just the idea of how to do better in terms of understanding pregnancy and fertility.

One of the other goals that's very special this year is we're looking at revising our consensus guidelines on how to manage hairy cell leukemia. The last ones were published in 2017, but the field has had a lot of advancement since then, so we've learned a lot more about how to take care of people with hairy cell leukemia. These are guidelines where all the experts here discuss what we think about how to diagnose and treat hairy cell leukemia, or in some cases, observe it without treatment because it doesn't always need treatment, and then we publish this in a journal that's reviewed by other peers, and then other doctors and researchers can then read that and get an idea of what this group thinks. That can help a lot of hematologists or oncologists that take care of someone with hairy cell leukemia, but maybe aren't working in the field where they get to go to meetings like this, but they want to know what the experts think about how to take care of people with hairy cell leukemia.

Having everyone's input on how to update our guidelines that we put together is going to be a really important thing this year.

Transcript has been edited for clarity and conciseness.

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