ESH 2014: Dr. Cathy Wu Explains TUMOR HETEROGENEITY and CLONAL EVOLUTION in CLL (Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia)

This is taken from the first of a two part interview with Dr. Cathy Wu in Greece where I spoke on the patients' perspective at a meeting of the Greek Hematology Professional Congress.

It is also a teaser of what is to come in the new website of the nonprofit The CLL Society. That CLL specific education and support site should launch in the next few weeks. It will offer much deeper and broader information and be more searchable than is possible with a blog. 

Be assured that my blog is not going away but may revert back to more of a personal blog and the place where I continue to host my candid and occasionally combative opinions and commentaries. 

Truth is that the plethora of news and emerging therapies in CLL have outgrown the capacity of my time linear blog to keep up. This new format also will offer the chances to hear other patient voices in what will be the only patient driven physician curated place on the web for CLL support and education.

I and the team of fellow volunteers are pretty excited. It's been a ton of work, but our mission is to address the unmet needs of the CLL community and we believe this new website will be a helpful piece of that effort. There is great information out there and we want to help everyone find it and explain it in our soon to be born strong and friendly CLL focused website.

Honestly, my efforts to help launch our nonprofit 510c3 and its website has consumed me, leaving less time to post here.

While we are still building phase 1 of the new website, I plan to continue to post news and interviews like this one here modified for this blog. The website will offer more links, a glossary, some surprise, and a whole lot more.

Stay tune, but I digress.

This clonal heterogeneity discussion is very important stuff on how our cancer evolves and what it means when we consider therapies.

TAKE AWAY POINTS:

·     Cancer by its nature is genomically unstable.
·     Over time it acquires more mutations.
·     New clones and sub-clones can arise over time.
·     Therapy can influence the balance and evolution of the clonal and sub-clonal populations.
·     Those changes may have significant implications for how to best manage our cancer.

PREFACE:

Hematology in general and CLL specifically are full of jargon and acronyms that can be both overwhelming and daunting.  With time and experience, you'll become familiar with the terminology and acronyms.  We will try to explain each medical term the first time it appears in an article, but we will use the true terminology so that you gain comfort and familiarity with the medical terms that you will see in your lab reports and in medical articles. We will also provide a glossary for your reference.

CLONAL HETEROGENEITY:

Dr. Cathy Wu out of Dana-Farber starts at the basics.

In the first of our two part interview from the International Conference on New Concepts in B Cell Malignancies: From molecular pathogenesis to personalized treatment in Greece in November 2014 she reminds us that while the concept that any cancer is made of multiple populations of different cells dates back to the 70s, it is our recent ability to look deeply and quickly at the genome with next generation genetic sequencing that has really cracked open our understanding of how huge a factor this is in one’s particular CLL aggressiveness and its ability to become resistance to therapy.

We now know that questions about the presence or absence of a good or bad prognostic indicator often should not be answered with a simple yes or no.

More importantly we know that our population of our cancer cells evolves over time. Hence the need to repeat FISH and other tests when the contemplating therapy.

An analogy: In most good movies the lead protagonist has an arc to his or her character. We see how he or she changes and evolves in response to the support received or the challenges faced.

So too it is with our cancer. Unfortunately CLL is much more like a movie than a snapshot. Dr. Wu explains our cancer may evolve over time in response to therapy and other selection pressures.

Please enjoy our video interview with Dr. Cathy Wu.

If you want to dig deep, take a look at this Blood Journal abstract or this abstract from ASH 2014 or this older full text from the Journal of Clinical Oncology or this on the evolution of resistance to BTK inhibitors such as ibrutinib as just a few of the many examples of the explosion of research in this field.

Our understanding of this complicated concept is itself evolving.

I believe it is critical research with enormous implications for how we should treat our cancer. 

More to come.

ESH 2014: Prof. Stephan Stilgenbauer Discusses Prognostic Factors, FCR and Implications for Therapy in CLL (chronic lymphocytic leukemia)

In part two of my interview from ESH in November 2014 from Greece with Professor Stilgenbauer of the University of Ulm, Germany we go deeper on the topics we cover in part one and introduce new subjects. I recommend you take a look at that post if you haven't already. That prior post also has links to even earlier reviews of some of the same areas of discussion.

In this segment, the doctor starts by using the examples of 11q or 17p deletion that help explains some of the subtleties of the difference between prognostic and predictive factors.

It is a nuanced subject, but one worthy of our efforts to understand as it can help guide our therapeutic choices.  His examples clearly outline the differences. Hopefully my brief introductory notes that follow also help.

The best known bad player found by FISH or interphase fluorescence in situ hybridization is deletion of 17p.

When the short arm of the 17th chromosome (17p) is deleted, gone with it is TP53 that is important in maintaining genomic stability when our DNA is reproducing itself. Because of its critical role in guarding the fidelity of each copy of the genome when our cells are replicating, it is considered a tumor suppressor. The doctor explains how it also fosters resistance to most chemo-immunotherapies.

The number two bad boy is 11q deletion.

The 11q arm carries ATM that is also involved, those less critically, in the same pathway protecting the stability of our genome. But the new discovery is that 11q deletion may also lead to loss of BIRC3 that leads to the jamming on of the pro-survival and anti-apoptotic NF-κB signaling pathway. More on this in later posts.

It's complicated, but the pieces are coming together.

Dr. Stilgenbauer points out that in those of us with 17p deletion with the relatively good news of having a positive mutation status, our CLL may be slow to progress. This combination of + mutation status and 17p deletion is an example of a prognostic factor- prognosticating about how we will do in the future.

He next points out that when patients with that same combo eventually do need treatment, it will most likely not respond to conventional chemo-immunotherapy (CIT) such as FCR. This is an example of a predictive factor, representing a "prediction" of the likelihood of a given therapy working.

If we are both unmutated and 17p deleted, sadly odds are we will both progress quickly and do poorly with traditional therapies. A double whammy. Bad prognostic and predictive factors. That's me.

He correctly points out the good initial response rates to CIT for those with 11q deletion (I am in this group too), but he neglects to point out that while we might get a deep response, it is not durable, possibly due to our cancer's ability to mutate more freely. He is right in highlighting the strong correlation between unmutated status and 11q deletion, which raises the questions about which is these two gives us the bad prognostic.

The professor's take on the possible "cures" with FCR is also instructive. Please give a critical listen.Much to ponder.

We also talk about the need for deep sequencing to search for 17p deletion or to check for TP53 function. He explains the new versus old ways to look at the chromosome.

Dr. Stilgenbauer outlines the sinister consequences that happens when the selective pressure of CIT is applied to even the smallest subclone population of 17p deletion cells. They can rise up and take charge when the cancer returns.

I believe that FISH is important but only a first step. Today we need to look for both deletions missed by FISH and smaller but critical subclones that are beyond the resolution of FISH. CLL management needs to move in this direction.

I don't want this post to be too much of a downer. While all statistics and cellular biology are important for predicting what happens to different groups, they do not determine individual destiny. And many of the new therapies' responses are blissfully blind to FISH status. I myself am unmutated, 11q deleted, 17p deleted, ZAP 70+, CD38+, have a complex karyotype and I am doing fine, thank you, but knowing this helped informed my decisions.

He closes with the familiar clarion call of the twin needs of having a CLL expert on our team and for more research.



More from ESH, Greece coming soon, including Dr. Wu on clonal heterogeneity and Dr. David Porter of U. Penn on CAR-T in CLL.

Many interviews to share from ASH last month in San Francisco are on the way.

Stay strong. We are all in this together.

ESH 2014: Prof. Stephan Stilgenbauer Reviews Predictive and Prognostic Markers in CLL (chronic lymphocytic leukemia)

I was asked to present the patient's perspective in CLL at a satellite symposium to the annual congress of the Hellenic Society of Hematology held in Thessaloniki in northern Greece near the birthplace of Alexander the Great last month. The sponsors took a risk in inviting a patient to speak to a group of hematologists but my reception was warm and enthusiastic despite my inability to speak in the native language.

As a result of the positive response I received for my 30 minutes on the podium, I was asked if I could shoot a series of monologues that address various aspects of why it is so critical that our voices be heard by the professional community that treats us. I will posting those here and later our CLL website soon.  Check out the first monologue here filmed soon after I flew home. More monologues to follow on other topics.

The Hellenic hematology congress was co-incident with another valuable meeting in Thessaloniki organized by the European School of Hematology (ESH), ESH 2014: International Conference on New Concepts in B Cell Malignancies: From molecular pathogenesis to personalized treatment so I stayed in town for an extra few days to attend the CLL sessions and shoot some videos for the blog.

On a personal note, on my one half day free in Macedonia, I did rent a car and drove in the rain to see the amazing underground museum that includes the unspoiled grave of Philip II, father of Alexander the Great. Don't miss it. I loved my much too brief return visit to Greece.

 

Grave of Phillip II

My ESH videos were embargoed until after ASH, so I am only able to share them now.

The first video interview is with Prof. Dr. med. Stephan Stilgenbauer of the University of Ulm.

We revisit the topic of prognosis and predictive factors. Here is a link to an earlier post on another aspect of this subject with Dr. Bill Wierda from MD Anderson. Dr. Jeff Sharman gets into some of the same material in this helpful post from iwCLL 2013.

The first message that I gathered from Prof. Stilgenbauer is that the significance of all these factors must be reassessed in this era of novel therapies and that process has only just begun. How they may have predicted and prognosticated about treatment with FCR is not always going to match up as to their relevance for therapy with ibrutinib or idelalisib. 

This should be an active area or reassessment and research. One possible example seems to be that patients with 17p deletion respond differently when treated upfront with ibrutinib versus when treated after they have relapsed with 17p deletion. More predictive and prognostic factors will emerge if we look. 

My next take way: It is no longer sufficient to test only only for the deletion of the short (p for petite) arm of the 17th chromosome (17p deletion), but we also must ask our hematologists to check the function of the TP53 gene. TP53 has been called the guardian of the genome because when it is functioning well, it protects our genetic information from being miscopied and thus spawning a malignant offspring. When it is missing or dysfunctional, cancers are both meaner and harder to kill. Here is a nice overview on TP53 from the NIH. Dr. Stilgenbauer discusses the relation between TP53 and 17p deletion.

Finally we touch briefly on some of the new prognostic factors found in CLL with the advent of deeper probing of our cancer's genetic makeup with next generation sequencing. These include mutations in NOTCH1 (a signaling pathway between adjacent cells) and SF3B1 (a surprise finding, a important in gene splicing). Here's the original article from the NEJM that goes into much greater detail.

Here is Dr. Stilgenbauer.




More soon from ESH and ASH.

As I write and edit these recent blog posts, it has become increasingly clear to me that the scope of what needs to be done to teach about CLL had grown beyond the capacity of this meager blog.

That will be a major part of the mission of the nonprofit CLL Society Inc., to inform and support both the newbie and the cognoscenti of the CLL community through a new dedicated and more robust CLL specific website.

Please complete our survey to let us know what are your unmet needs by clicking this link: https://cllsociety.questionpro.com. It closes at the end of the week.

And thanks so much to the many of you that have already finished the survey and a big thanks to those of you that have generously supported us already with a tax deductible donation. It will all be used to extend and deepen our reach with more knowledge and support.