15th International Workshop on Chronic Lymphocytic Leukaemia (iwCLL 2013)

Overview of upcoming trials and possibility of new treatment approaches in CLL

Prof Wierda - MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, Texas, USA

Please give an overview of upcoming trials and how the data from these will allow for new treatment approaches

I think it’s challenging, it’s a great challenge to have because I know we’re all going to be very busy, we’re going to all be very busy thinking about how to best incorporate these, how to best manage patients. I gave a talk yesterday about prognostic factors and how they might be considered in terms of evaluating patients and what they might mean when we’re able to identify predictive factors. So what I’m focussed on right now is developing these new agents, testing patients for all of these prognostic factors to identify which may be predictive factors for therapy. What I’d like to see in the future is to identify predictive factors for patients who are going on these new therapeutic strategies so that we can identify treatments that are most suited for individual patients. We should be able to appreciate better long-term survivorship and potentially cure for patients with CLL.

Economics is going to be a big topic. My thoughts, I was worried about the economics about this because you hear rumours about how much these drugs are going to cost. It’s a good thing that there are a lot of different drugs that are being tested and are showing great promise because that creates some competition. So I’m not as worried as I was when it was seeming that there may be one or two agents that are out there in development looking very promising. With time we’ll be able to… first priority would be to optimise treatment for patients and improve outcomes. With that we’ll see a number of different agents getting approved and competition is always a good thing in terms of economics.