Ongoing Trials of Combination Therapy for Treating CLL
Susan M. O’Brien, MD, highlights ongoing trials from 2021 examining combination therapies for patients with chronic lymphocytic leukemia.
Susan M. O’Brien, MD: Some [of the] impactful trials are combination trials. I mentioned there has been data with ibrutinib [Imbruvica] and venetoclax [Venclexta] generated in the GLOW trial [NCT03462719]. That was a randomized trial of ibrutinib and venetoclax versus chlorambucil obinutzumab [Gazyva], and the data suggest, not surprisingly, that the small molecule combination is better. There are many trials ongoing, and all of them are using venetoclax because that’s the only BCL2 inhibitor we have as of right now. Some of them are using other BTK inhibitors such as acalabrutinib [Calquence] or zanabrutinib, some of them are using PI3K inhibitors, such as umbralisib [Ukoniq]. Some of them are using obinutuzumab and some of them are not adding an antibody to the combination of small molecules. There’s really a plethora of them, and we’ve seen limited data so far. That data are very exciting to see updated because the high rates of MRD [minimal residual disease] undetectability which suggest that these are going to be very durable remissions. That data are very exciting and lots of it is coming at [the American Society of Hematology Annual Meeting] this year.
