What You Need to Know About Developing CLL Research

What You Need to Know About Developing CLL Research 

What You Need to Know About Developing CLL Research from Patient Empowerment Network on Vimeo.

Are there CLL research advances that patients should be aware of? Dr. Javier Pinilla-Ibarz outlines the latest in CLL treatment and research.

Dr. Javier Pinilla-Ibarz is the Lymphoma Section Head and Director of Immunotherapy in the malignant hematology department at Moffitt Cancer Center. More about this expert here.

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Transcript:

Patricia Murphy:        

It sounds like we have made tremendous progress with CLL. What kind of clinical trials should patients be investigating? What are they – what’s out there?

Dr. Javier Pinilla:        

Well, there is no doubt that a lot of people until now were really looking for venetoclax front line clinical trials. Now it’s available in the clinical practice. However, we’re still trying to figure out combination of drugs, right? For example, in this case, I have mentioned we have a very good drug like ibrutinib in front line. We have all the BTK inhibitors that are coming up such as acalabrutinib. We have other PI3K inhibitors that are being not very successful in the front line, right to the second line, like idelalisib, duvelisib, even copanlisib.

And other drugs, like I said, ibrutinib. So, we have a plethora of drugs, really available as clinical trial outside the ones that have approved. However, one of the things that we are really starting to explore in the recent year is how we combine all these mechanisms of action. The most typical combination that we are really now under trial is the combination of two or three drugs, as happens in many other forms of cancer.

So, this combination of these three – some of, two or three of these drugs, is very, very well studied now in an integral trial, the ECOG, the alliance trial, we gonna start to see those trials, and of course, our patients in front line will have the opportunity. Besides that, we gonna see more and more trials are going to combine patients who are already in chronic therapy with ibrutinib with a second drug, with the goal to in the future be able to discontinue therapy because it’s one of the issues that ibrutinib has these days. Patient takes the drug for life.