So my name is Mark Ruschewski. I'm a clinical investigator and I work at the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Maryland. Here at this ASH meeting, we were presented in an oral abstract that showed us the final results of a phase two study testing Ibrutinib with a chemotherapy regimen known as Tediar. And this is in patients that have aggressive B-cell lymphoma that involves the central nervous system. So these are patients that have a very poor prognosis with standard therapy and partly that's because many medicines we try to give to these patients don't actually cross the blood-brain barrier. So we've known for a while that Ibrutinib crosses the blood-brain barrier and we were then using a chemotherapy regimen that we had developed at the NCI to see if the combination of Ibrutinib and Tediar would actually result in not only complete responses but durable complete responses. What we saw in this regimen in this trial is that patients as old as 89 years old were able to tolerate it and it led to a complete response rate of nearly 70% in situations in which the Ibrutinib was active. Those complete responses didn't always lead to cure but we do have a substantial number of patients now that have gone out two, three, and even four years and have not relapsed. So we think this provides an option for patients that have already exhausted other standard therapy options and may actually have the promise to cure them of their lymphoma even when it involves the central nervous system.
HealthTree • December 28, 2023