Novel Updates in the Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia Treatment Landscape

At the 2023 Lymphoma, Leukemia & Myeloma Congress in New York, New York, John Allan, MD, Weill Cornell Medicine, New York, New York, discusses novel updates in the chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) treatment landscape, highlighting studies that focused on the use of Bruton’s tyrosine kinase (BTK) inhibitor combination treatments for CLL. 

Transcript:

Hi, I'm John Allan. I am an associate professor of medicine at Weill Cornell in New York City. I'm here at the Lymphoma, [Leukemia &] Myeloma Congress of 2023. If you weren't able to join us here, I gave 2 lectures—2 didactic sessions. The first one [was] on ibrutinib updates, particularly focusing on [the] CAPTIVATE [study] and ibrutinib-venetoclax-based combinations.

We reviewed data on long-term outcomes of ibrutinib monotherapy and then looked at how combinations might be playing a role in [the] management of our patients with frontline CLL, reviewing that data from CAPTIVATE and other combination studies that have been performed, showing encouraging activity and highlighting areas that are still a bit unknown, in terms of how do we best incorporate combination treatments in our patients with CLL. 

The other discussion that we had was around novel therapeutics in CLL as part of this session where I focused on bispecific antibodies in this space and relapsed/refractory CLL.

Up until this year, we haven't had much clinical data—there's been some good pre-clinical data suggesting that bispecific antibodies do have activity and that potentially even [Bruton’s tyrosine kinase] (BTK) inhibitors like ibrutinib or acalabrutinib and zanubrutinib, and others might, in fact, be able to potentiate the activity of bispecific antibodies. 

And, now, we're seeing clinical data with monotherapy approaches with epcoritamab and glofitamab, either in Richter’s [syndrome] or in CLL, with encouraging data, [and] short follow-up right now. But, patients are very heavily pretreated and getting responses, and even some are achieving [measurable residual disease] (MRD) negativity. 

So, we highlighted those specific studies in that space and look forward to maturing data coming out of there [as well as] other antibodies in development.

Source:

Allan, J. Ibrutinib and CAPTIVATE Data Updates/Case Discussions in CLL/What, When. Presented at Lymphoma, Leukemia & Myeloma Congress; October 18-21, 2023. New York, NY