[gentle serene music] Marina Kremenskya, and I'm at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York.

[gentle serene music] Polycythemia vera is a chronic, uh, blood cancer, um, that is pretty rare, though we see a lot of it here at Mount Sinai.

Um, and what happens with PV, as we call it, is that, um, there is, uh, increased abnormal production of red blood cells.

So there is too many red blood cells that are being produced, and that is inappropriate.

Um, and the complication of that is that, um, patients are at higher risk for blood clots.

So this is one of the major problems with PV.

So for the patient with a higher burden disease, where on one hand you're treating their symptoms, just like you described, what treatment is there now? What is the state of the art for treating patients with more advanced disease? I'd love some examples from your clinic.

Absolutely.

So this is actually the part that's really exciting right now because we have new treatments.

So I'll start a few sentences historically.

This is not that long ago because I haven't been in practice that long.

And I've gone through this where a patient with systemic mastocytosis, we're treating them with medications that, again, are nonspecific for this.

So we used to treat patients with hydroxyurea just to try to decrease the burden of the disease.

How's their quality of life? And when you think about your team of clinicians you work with at a large center, what are some of the needs that patients have that I'm sure you do your best to try to help them with?