My name is Dr. Ryan Jacobs. I'm the director of lymphoma at Levine Cancer Institute, part of Wake Forest University School of Medicine in Charlotte, North Carolina. I have a few abstracts that I'm presenting today at the poster session for the EHA 2024 conference and I wanted to highlight two of them. The first is in chronic lymphocytic leukemia and it is specifically looking at treatment for previously untreated CLL patients. So right now the most popular treatments for chronic lymphocytic leukemia are a class of drugs called Brutin's tyrosine kinase inhibitors and Abrutinib was the first one of those that was approved all the way back in 2014. The other common target that we use to treat CLL is with an inhibition of Bcl2 and there's only one drug approved that targets Bcl2 and that's Venetoclax. They currently have approvals as single agent drugs or in combinations with an IV antibody but with recognizing that patients are interested in oral treatments they looked at combining the two drugs, Abrutinib and Venetoclax, that are both pills and when Abrutinib is usually used it's given indefinitely and also recognizing that that can cause more toxicity and there's financial concerns with long-term treatment. The interest in the study was also looking at giving a drug like Abrutinib but with Venetoclax over a defined treatment timeline and this study was called the Captivate study. It was a phase two trial led by Pharmacyclics, the company that makes Abrutinib and it took the CLL patients around 150 and gave them on a fixed duration Abrutinib with Venetoclax for one year. What we're reporting on, this trial has been reported many times before at many other conferences but as we get longer and longer follow-up we're interested to see how these patients are doing that have been off treatment for so many years. This is actually five and a half years of follow-up. These are patients that have been off treatment for four and a half years at this point. What's remarkable is that there's still, when we're trying to look at how long the average patient is going to respond, we still don't have that number yet because more than half the patients are still free of disease progressing. Actually when we look at the patients with more favorable disease characteristics when you look at the genes of their cancer, those patients, around 80% five and a half years out are still free of progression. So really remarkable, it was well tolerated. This is a combination that's approved in Europe, in Canada, and even some other countries like Brazil. It's not approved in the United States but we likely will see combinations like this maybe with other partner drugs to Venetoclax other than Abrutinib in the future. So exciting for CLL patients to potentially have this option or an option like it become available in the near future in the United States and it is encouraging to patients in all these other countries and areas that have approvals already.
HealthTree • June 25, 2024