HEADING HOME FROM ASH

Our flight is delayed from Orlando and we have a tight connect in Phoenix. What else is new! Not looking good.

ASH 2015 was amazing.  So much good news and clarifying news on novel therapies.

Watch here and on the CLL Society website for the news, interviews and updates.

Here are a few teasers:

• Venetoclax (ABT-199) looks very helpful for those who have failed ibrutinib or idelalisib.
• ACP-196, a new BTK  inhibitor has stellar results with few side effects.
• Ibrutinib does a super job upfront in the over 65 gang. Should become standard of care frontline.
• The addition of idelalisib to bendamustine and rituximab (BR) greatly improves outcomes, but the use of idelalisib frontline needs to be managed more carefully to get the good results it offers due to increased risk of liver issues.
• Promising results with new signal blockers such as ONO-4059 and duvelisib and TG-1202 and the immune modulator, CC-122 and high dose methylprednisolone (HDMP) and new antibodies and much more.

More details and other results soon.

Stay strong.

Gotta get ready for our flight, I hope. The problem is a broken bathroom door.

UPDATE: After changing the flight 3 times, we would have missed our connection by about 15 minutes, so we changed everything to fly into LAX  more than an hour from home, but at least in the same time zone. Our bags are a different story.

Brian

iwCLL 2013: Dr. Jeff Sharman Outlines Options if You Need Treatment NOW

In Part 5 of my interview from iwCLL 2013, Dr. Jeff Sharman outlines what factors go into deciding  how to manage our disease NOW with these new drugs coming, but not here yet.

He lists many of the available trials for both treatment naive and relapsed refractory patients, focusing mostly on the two leading oral CLL drugs, idelalisib and ibrutinib.

As always your best source of finding out about the latest on the status of any clinical trials is visiting clinical trials.gov and don't be afraid to email the trial co-ordinator if you have questions. They want to hear from us. That's how they fill their trials. It is a very user friendly web site and should be part of your life.

There are some great options out there, and we need to know more. Our work is not done. We are not cured with any of these therapies. There are relapses late and early.

We need more clinical research to tell us what works best and most safely, but without us patients enrolling, all research halts.  No doubt the lightning fast FDA approval of ibrutinib, going from test tube to prescription pad in under 8 years, was facilitated by the dazzling rapidity of accrual in many of the important trials.

Please carefully consider investigating some of the promising trials of combination therapies with the better known novel agents or one of the newer less studied but very promising novel agents such as ABT-199 and IPI-145 or ONO-4059 and others.

Here is Dr. Sharman. If you haven't seen Parts 1-4 please scroll down or search under Dr. Sharman on my blog.



Part 6 and 7 are on their way.

And so are my interviews with Drs. Kay, Byrd, Kipps, Pagel and Hallek.

On a personal note, I am a touch sick again or still: a deep chesty cough and fatigue. We will see what the morning brings. If I am not better, time to break out for my "just in case" antibiotic.