Hi, I'm Professor Con Tam from the Alfred Hospital in Melbourne, Australia, and I'm attending ASH 2023 this year. And one of the really exciting abstracts to come out this year in ASH is a follow-up of the head-to-head ibrutinib versus semibrutinib study, a study called Alpine. So by way of background, ibrutinib is a commonly used drug for patients with reduced CLL and has really set the standard for this condition for many, many years. But ibrutinib has had a few side effects, in particular bleeding and heart abnormalities, and semibrutinib is a next-generation version of ibrutinib, which has a potential for fewer side effects and better outcome. The Alpine study is a head-to-head comparison of ibrutinib and xenobutinib that was first reported last year. And from last year's report, what we saw was that xenobutinib indeed had much fewer side effects, so there's much fewer heart arrhythmias on xenobutinib. But one thing that was surprising from last year's presentation was that xenobutinib was also even more effective than ibrutinib in causing a longer remission. That was a story that was a little bit skeptical, because until now we haven't seen one particular version of a BTK inhibitor working better than another. So this year, what we've done is we've extended the follow-up by another year, and we've seen that this difference of xenobutinib being better than ibrutinib is maintained with longer follow-up. So it looks like a real story. It looks like that xenobutinib is a better drug than ibrutinib. One is safer, but it also works better in CLL. Thank you very much.
HealthTree • December 27, 2023