Hi, I'm Carrie Rogers. I'm an associate professor in the division of hematology at The Ohio State University. And I'm here at ASH 2023 and want to share with you some research that I did in collaboration with Janssen Real World Evidence. So there are actually two different studies we presented at this meeting that I worked on in collaboration with them and some other investigators. And what we were looking at is the question of for people who are taking the BTK inhibitor ibrutinib for the CLL that had to reduce the dose of the medication, how did that change their outcome in terms of how well ibrutinib worked for their CLL? So these were two different databases that look at the experience of people with CLL, but they're kind of data that's extracted from things like electronic health records. So you can tell when someone started a new treatment, but you can't capture right when their CLL starts to progress. So both studies use the time from starting ibrutinib to taking a next treatment as a marker for when their CLL might have progressed after they started ibrutinib. So in both studies, they looked at people who had a dose reduction of ibrutinib and found that this did not change this time to next treatment or how long from starting ibrutinib it was before they needed to take an next CLL treatment. So this really means that for people who need to reduce the dose of ibrutinib, we can feel confident that it is very unlikely to impact how long the drug will work for their CLL. It does not mean that everybody should just automatically reduce the dose of ibrutinib because again, these two different studies looked at people who experienced a dose reduction and that was done by their physician for a reason. So it wasn't that everyone was just blanket dose reduced. But we can now say with confidence that if people need to reduce the dose for things like side effects, that it shouldn't impact the outcome on their cancer.
HealthTree • December 29, 2023