Influence of Targeted Agents in the Treatment of Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia

At the 2024 Great Debates & Updates in Hematologic Malignancies meeting in New York, John Allan, MD, Weill Cornell Medicine, New York, shares expert insight on the influence of targeted agents in the treatment of chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL), focusing particularly on frontline therapy.

Transcript:

Hello, I'm John Allan. I am coming to you from New York City where I practice at Weill Cornell [Medicine], where I'm a [chronic lympocytic leukemia] CLL and lymphoma physician and specialist. My presentation here at the Great Debates and Updates [in Hematologic Malignancies meeting] of 2024 here in New York is based on CLL updates and looking at the impact targeted agents have had in this space particularly, and with a focus on frontline therapy essentially.

I highlight how we select patients, what the current evidence show[s] regarding outcomes in certain subsets of high-risk patients, et cetera, and tr[ied] to compare and contrast various approaches, because currently we are lacking randomized head-to-head data of fixed duration or continuous therapy strategies. My talk will highlight on many of those and [will] hopefully help people make those decisions in their own routine real-life practices.

Additionally, the second half of the didactic will focus on [measurable residual disease] (MRD) and its potential role, particularly as we are seeing more fixed-duration approaches being preferred for younger patients, things like that. How do we maximize an MRD-negative result? There is increasing evidence that MRD negativity does associate strongly with better longer-term outcomes.

I think my opinion is that if we are using any fixed-duration approaches, we need to figure out how to optimize it---how the vast majority or most of our patients can achieve that endpoint and safely stop treatment for significant periods of time. I'll highlight the current evidence of our MRD results and how those incorporate into current clinical trials and the potential future of where we now will be incorporating those in terms of response adaptive treatment approaches.

Source:

Allan J. Targeted Approaches for Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia/Small Lymphocytic Lymphoma. Presented at the 2024 Great Debates & Updates in Hematological Malignancies: April 5-6, 2024. New York City, NY.