Hopeful CLL commentary from Dr Bruce Cheson

Here’s a snippet from his post about the upcoming ASH (American Society of Hematology) conference in New Orleans, LA in December. My own doc, Dr Ian Flinn will be presenting on trial data with ipi-145. I can’t wait. There is a video on page one but the audio did not play well for me. Here’s page three from the article

Bumper Crop of New Agents

The rest of the studies focus on the new agents. We have several ibrutinib trials, including a single-agent study in patients with or without 17p deletion. There will be the final analysis of bendamustine and rituximab plus ibrutinib.^[13] Do you need the chemotherapy? Do you need the bendamustine? There will be another abstract^[14] with rituximab and ibrutinib alone.

This isn’t the only exciting drug. There are phosphoinositide (PI) 3-kinase inhibitors, which appear to be very good and are very impressive, perhaps as good as ibrutinib when you combine them with a drug like rituximab. In fact, a recent study of rituximab-idelalisib vs rituximab-placebo was closed early because of a survival advantage.

We are also going to be seeing a list of new PI 3-kinase inhibitors for the treatment of CLL: a new delta inhibitor, a new gamma inhibitor, and others. We’ll have to see which of these provides an advantage over the others, if at all. But in any event, we have great new drugs that will be changing the landscape of non-Hodgkin lymphomas, Hodgkin lymphoma, and chronic lymphocytic leukemia.

This is Bruce Cheson, signing off for Medscape Hematology. I will be back with you after the ASH meeting in New Orleans. See you there. Goodbye.