What is the risk of relapse with CLL?

What is the risk of relapse with CLL?

Again, it depends on the therapy used. There are a couple of tests that you should talk to your doctor about getting that are really standard before you start treatment. And at the time of relapse that can determine have some prognostic value and while it's not perfect, can determine kind of what you can expect in terms of how long you'll be on the therapy, if it's something like a BTK inhibitor or how long before, you know, time to next treatment, how long your next treatment for something like venetoclax. 

These are looking really at the biology of the cloud to define like a patient specific genetics, not the genetics that they were born with, but of this yellow cells, really. So there's something called IgG v mutational status. And all of this testing can be done from the blood if a patient has, you know, detectable cells in the blood. And so if we mutated for the most part, although we're learning more generally has a more favorable prognosis or response to treatment, depending and it's very treatment specific, actually, you know exactly what you can expect. But that test should be done.

Fish testing for absence of the p53 gene or deletion 17 is an important prognostic marker and there's some other abnormalities that can be tested for. And then actually DNA sequencing, looking at changes or mutations in the DNA of the clone, one that we know is a little bit higher risk is a P 53 mutation, and that's actually a change in the P53 gene. So this is definitely something to talk to your doctor about and really standard of care to do this testing before starting treatment. And also, you know, at the time of each relapse or treatment switch.