Ibrutinib + Venetoclax Treatment for Mantle Cell Lymphoma

Hi, I'm Kon Tan. I'm a professor of hematology and hematologist at Alfred Hospital in Melbourne, Australia and I'm here at ASH 2023. Now ASH has a light-breaker session, which means that some of the most prominent and important research that has really appeared in the last minute gets presented at the light-breaker session on Tuesday and I'm very lucky to be an author on a light-breaker abstract on the use of ibrutinib and venanoclax for mental cell lymphoma. So there's a rare disease called mental cell lymphoma and if you have failed chemotherapy or chemotherapy no longer works, then ibrutinib, which is a targeted drug, is considered to be the standard treatment for mental cell lymphoma after chemotherapy. Back in 2014, my group did a small study where we combined ibrutinib with a second drug called venanoclax and we showed that the results seemed to be very good. We had very high response rates, our patients stayed in remission for a very long time and importantly some patients had such a good response that they were able to stop the combination and still be in remission some five to six years later. But that was a small study so back in about 2016 or so we set up a randomized study where we randomly compared ibrutinib versus the combination of ibrutinib plus venanoclax in patients with mental cell lymphoma and it took many years for this study to mature but finally we have the results of this study this year and we're really happy to report that the new combination of ibrutinib and venanoclax worked even better than ibrutinib. It had reduced the chance of the disease coming back by about half and patients and the side effects of the combination, although there are some side effects, are manageable when most patients can take this combination and have a long control of the lymphoma. So we're really happy that we've found these results of this study because that was the only way to tell if the new combination is really better than ibrutinib by itself. Obviously what will happen now is that the health authorities will look at this study and decide whether the cost of the venanoclax additional drug is worth the benefit that we've seen but we hope very soon that our patients across the world will be able to receive this combination as a new standard of care for mental cell lymphoma.