Questions Remain When Treating Patients With CLL

Alexey Danilov, MD, PhD, associate director, Toni Stephenson Lymphoma Center, and professor, Division of Lymphoma, Department of Hematology & Hematopoietic Cell Transplantation, City of Hope Comprehensive Cancer Center, explains the unmet needs for patients with relapsed/refractory chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL)

In the CLL space, targeted agents such as Bruton tyrosine kinase (BTK) inhibitors, PI3K inhibitors, B-cell lymphoma 2 (BCL2) inhibitors, venetoclax (Venclexta), and more, have come to the forefront.

While targeted therapies have played a role in rapidly expanding the treatment landscape for patients with CLL, a variety of unmet needs remain, including for patients with mutations, high-risk disease, and those who are double refractory.

Transcription:

0:08 | The key unmet needs would include the double refractory patients, those who progressed on BTK, and BCL two inhibitors, as well as patients with high genetic risk disease. Just deletion17p or p53 mutation, those patients still have in furious progression free survival even on novel targeted agents. And if patients who are younger would still be candidates for allogeneic stem cell transplant, we have to do better with that particular patient group.

0:43 | And there is, like I said, a lot of focus on time limited therapy, combination therapy with an effort to achieve deep responses in CLL and longer treatment free periods.