My name is Othman Alsowaff, I'm a haemothologist and medical oncologist from the University Hospital of Cologne in Germany. And so at this conference we are showing data from the CLL17 trial, a first readout from this randomized phase 3 trial in which we compare two treatment approaches in CLL by means of randomly allocating patients to receiving a continuous treatment where patients take a tablet every day until disease progression or fixed duration options where patients just require one year of treatment by combining two tablets per day or two regimens or two compounds for a year or combining a tablet with an infusion again over a year. And so we are comparing the approaches of Veneto-Clack's Ubinotuzumab, which is a combination of a tablet and an infusion, to Veneto-Clack's ibrutinib, which is a combination of two different forms of oral tablets for CLL, also administered for a year, to a continuous treatment with a so-called BTK inhibitor, also administered as a tablet, but not just for one year, but actually until disease progression, meaning until the disease does not respond to treatment anymore, which can mean multiple years of therapy. And the reasoning behind this clinical study was pretty much to see whether one-year therapy is clinically equally effective, so it works as well as a continuous treatment where patients have to have multiple years of therapy. And so the goal was therefore to demonstrate clinical equal efficacy and indeed this early readout from this study where we observed over 900 patients who were randomly allocated to any of those three options. We did observe that indeed those fixed duration options, both of them, were non-inferior, meaning as effective as a continuous therapy. And this has a lot of implications for us as clinicians and for patients because it means that we now can confidently consider limited duration approaches where we just treat for one year and produce hopefully multiple years of treatment free time with similar efficacy as a long-term therapy. And so for most patients this can be therefore a very relevant treatment option. Of course with longer observation we will understand whether there might be some subgroups of patients who benefit more or less from these approaches, so there are some high-risk disease features for instance that might benefit more from continuous treatment or other kinds of combination therapies. But for the vast majority of patients with previously untreated CLL, fixed duration options should certainly be considered equally effective and therefore because of the advantage of treatment free intervals they provide also be primarily considered. If our videos have helped you in any way and you're able to please consider making a donation to help us continue this important work. Your gift will go three times as far when we reach five hundred thousand dollars by the end of the year. Every contribution, big or small, makes a difference and we're deeply grateful for your support.
HealthTree • December 23, 2025