VIDEO: Where future CLL research should focus

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What we would all like to see is, is there a way to ultimately eradicate the disease? I've talked to you about improving the number of lines of therapy that we have available to us. And there's interesting data that was reported at the last American Society of Hematology Meeting that would suggest that in our novel treatment era, that we appear to have normalized life expectancy for CLL patients. They looked at, you know, patients treated since 2014 that had gotten ibrutinib as their first treatment, and of course, ibrutinib was used because that was what was available starting in 2014. And it's our small molecule inhibitor target agent that's been available the longest. And they looked at the overall survival of those patients and overlaid it with the survival expectation of the US population, age-matched, and the survival curves overlap. So as is, it seems like we've accomplished something huge, which is seemingly normalizing life expectancy.

For our CLL patients, it'll be interesting to see, you know, corroborating reports of that. But the initial report certainly is encouraging, and I think it's only gotten better since 2014 in terms of the options that we have available. Where we'd like to go in the future, I think, is trying to find a way to maybe completely eradicate the CLL with a certain treatment or combination of treatments. And that came up a lot at the iwCLL 2023 Meeting that just happened recently in Boston about, you know, what are the potential strategies that we could have to ultimately do that? And there were some interesting ideas thrown around. Of course, combining BTK with BCL2 in a time-limited fashion and maybe consolidating patients with something like a bispecific antibody to address microscopic disease left behind was one interesting thought that came up.