‘The Future Is Bright’ for R/R CLL Treatment Landscape

Patients with relapsed or refractory chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) should remain positive because outcomes with current treatment “are only going to be better than current published data,” an expert told CURE®.

Understanding that treatment outcomes are measured in years is important, said Dr. John N. Allan during an interview with CURE®. He noted that some patients who have not received chemoimmunotherapy may respond to treatments for approximately a decade before their disease worsens or spreads, so the “future is bright.”

Allan is an associate professor of clinical medicine at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York and recently presented at the 42nd Annual Chemotherapy Foundation Symposium (CFS) in New York.

WATCH: Understanding Treatment Sequences in Managing R/R CLL

With CLL as a unique disease, Allan explained that researchers will be addressing specific mechanisms of resistance, meaning how the disease resists treatments.

“We are now identifying that immunotherapeutic approaches seem to be very effective in the CLL space, and so things like CAR-T [cell therapy] and bispecifics are new classes of drugs that are going to be implemented in a wider use,” he said.

Following CFS, Allan sat down with CURE® to discuss why patients with relapsed or refractory CLL should remain positive and the existing improvements these treatments have demonstrated so far.

Transcript:

Remain positive and understand that these outcomes are measured in years and sometimes close to decades before patients [start] to progress. The fact and the expectation that outcomes in relapsed settings are only going to be better than current published data in patients [who] have never seen chemoimmunotherapy and so, just remain positive. The future is bright. There's a lot of research going to address specific mechanisms of resistance, and outcomes are excellent for the vast majority, if not all, [of] patients.

Transcript was edited for clarity and conciseness.

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