Advances in CLL Care Through Collaborative Research

Dr. Adam Kittai discusses the remarkable progress over the past decade in chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) research, which has improved both patient survival and drug safety.  Dr. Kittai also reflects on how the CLL Global Research Foundation’s annual Alliance meeting provides a rare opportunity for global experts to collaborate, share insights, and set research goals for the future.

Transcript

Dr. Adam Kittai:

So CLL research has come a long way over the last 10 years. Where we have really revolutionized the way we treat CLL, leading to improvements in overall survival, and also improvements of safety of the drugs that we’re using to treat our patients. One of the studies that was presented at our last American Society of Hematology meeting that I was really excited about, looked at patient reported outcomes, and showed that when we start treating our patients with our modern therapies, they are not only living longer, but they’re feeling better. So we’re getting this nice balance between improving efficacy and also making our patients’ lives improved with the treatment we’re giving.

It’s exciting to be at this alliance meeting, CLL Global today, because we get to sit with colleagues and just speak about CLL. In general, besides the IWCL workshop that happens every two years at an international location, there is not any specific CLL group meetings that we have. And so it’s really nice to get global experts together in one room and decide what we’re excited about for CLL, and set expectations about what we’re all going to be pursuing over the near future. In addition, we’re all friends with each other, so it’s just nice to see everybody, because we all work around the country, around the world. And so getting in one room together, talking about what we’re all doing, how we can collaborate, because ultimately collaboration is the key, we can’t be working in our silos, and we need to work together to make improvements for our patients.

It’s important to fund CLL research because even though we’ve made strides in the efficacy of the drugs that we’re giving, and we’ve now basically not used chemotherapy anymore, which was a huge leap forward, patients are still dying from CLL, they’re still dying from complications of CLL. And ultimately we need to develop drugs that can eventually cure patients. Because even though we have these time-limited regimens, we have these continuous regimens, patients are still getting toxicities from the treatments we’re giving, even though the toxicities are pretty well tolerated. And also patients have financial toxicity. So we still need to fund research for CLL so that we can find even better drugs that ultimately lead to a cure, and hopefully lead to a side-effect profile that is very well tolerated, at a cheap cost that is available to all patients with CLL.