At the 65th ASH Annual Meeting in San Diego, California, Adrian Wiestner, MD, National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland, discusses exciting possibilities for the future of chronic lymphocytic leukemia treatment, including the prospect of time-limited treatment periods and T-cell-engaging bispecific antibodies. 

Transcript:

Dr Adrian Wiestner: My name is Adrian Wiestner. I am a hematologist and investigator at the [National Institutes of Health] (NIH) working on chronic lymphocytic leukemia, and I'm here at the ASH Meeting 2023 in San Diego. It's been my pleasure to present the long-term data from our study with ibrutinib that we initiated in 2012. 

Oncology Learning Network: What are some exciting breakthroughs in the treatment landscape of chronic lymphocytic leukemia that may affect patient outcomes in the future?

Dr Adrian Wiestner: What I talked about is really a continuous treatment, which has the downside of potentially also causing side effects over time. Most of our patients in the long-term study have tolerated the treatment well, but some had to discontinue because of side effects. So it's exciting, certainly as if we have time-limited relatively shorter periods of treatment that can induce deeper remissions with long-term off-treatment. 

There are many presentations here at ASH showing that this is really feasible and can achieve that. The other aspect that I alluded to a little bit [is that] I think the immune system can play a role in overcoming CLL. 

The strategies that have been explored [chimeric antigen receptor] (CAR) T-cells, I think for CLL, have been somewhat challenging, but I'm excited about the prospect of using what we call T-cell engaging bispecific antibodies to help the immune control of the CLL cells.

Source: 

Itsara A, Sun C, Bryer E, et al. Long-Term Outcomes in Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia Treated with Ibrutinib: 10-Year Follow-up of a Phase 2 Study. Presented at the ASH 65th Annual Meeting & Exposition; December 9-12 2023; San Diego, California. Abstract 201