ESH 2014: The Future Role of FCR and new data on venetoclax and rituximab in CLL (chronic lymphocytic leukemia) and my latest lab results

I thought I sneak in one last post from LAX before I board my plane to Wroclaw, Poland via Munich.

It is mostly about the new posts on the CLL Society's website and our nonprofit's news, but I wanted to share that my latest lab results from my visit to the infusion center for IVIG remains most boring with a low normal hemoglobin, a high normal platelet count and an absolute lymphocyte count of 1.2.  YEAH! Of course that really matters is the count of clonal B cells and that takes flow cytometry, but at least I know that nothing major is happening. Slow and steady makes me happy.

This week on the CLL Society website we bring the second part of our interview with Professor Michael Hallek of Koln, Germany, the director of the German CLL Study Group and a major CLL researcher and thinker.

He starts by discussing his “fast boat” adaptive trial strategy (similar in many ways to that of Prof. Hillmen in the UK), essentially looking for the most tailored therapy based on not just predictive factors, but also on how we patients actually respond in trials. He is looking for what I call that perfect Goldilocks’ mix of “ as much as necessary, as little as possible” therapy.

In the second half of the interview, he makes a cogent argument for the ongoing use of FCR frontline in select patients. While many of us are not fans of chemo-immunotherapy (CIT), Professor Hallek has strong data to support his perspective. Listen with an open mind.

Please give a look here in our section on conference coverage from 2014.

We also share my comments and background on an important oral abstract presented at the 20^th Congress of the European Hematology Association (EHA), June 11-15, 2015 on venetoclax (ABT-199 or GDC-199) and rituximab. In relapsed patients, the total response rate, the complete response rate, the MRD- rate and the ability for some to be able to remain disease free after stopping the drug is important data that you can find here in our 2015 conference coverage section.

We have a significant backlog of important educational material mostly from large conferences such as ASH 2014 and others from 2015 that we plan to post over the next few months.

In a first step to speed up the process, our first high school intern volunteer, the granddaughter of the CLL Society's attorney, has joined us online to help her earn her community service hours by helping us catalog all the videos that we have produced and are storing on the web.

We are working hard to expand what we offer to the tens of thousands of online readers and to actuate our ambitious plans for patient-centric, physician-curated live education and support. One volunteer medical director (yours truly), his unpaid wife and one part-time RN can’t do it all, although I have to say we have made some amazing progress in our mission to meet the unmet needs of the CLL community in the less than 90 days since our nonprofit’s website launched. Our website is #1 in organic Google searches for CLL Society despite having no search engine optimization in place. We are too busy trying to get our content up.

There is so much more we must do. Your suggestions, help, support, donations, ideas, and feedback are what guide us and keep us going.

We remain forever committed to open content for all with no need to sign in or share any of your personal information to see a video or to get the help you need. If you haven’t done so already, we encourage you to please sign up to receive alerts regarding new postings and for our quarterly newsletters (first one will be published in September) and to share with other patients, caregivers or concerned family or anyone whose life is touched by CLL.

The CLL Society will be at iwCLL in Australia in September to cover the news and we are planning an amazing patient meeting the day before the researchers' meeting in Sydney with Lymphoma Australia. 

Stay strong.

We are all in this together.

Brian Koffman

Volunteer Medical Director, CLL Society

This Week in CLL: (chronic lymphocytic leukemia) Chemotherapy, News of the Helios Trial, New Drug Approvals and the High Cost of Cancer Medications

The annual humongous meeting of ASCO (American Society of Clinical Oncology) 2015 in Chicago did offer those of us with CLL ( chronic lymphocytic leukemia) a few interesting abstracts and one excellent education session, but this week we wanted to share some news unrelated to ASCO on our website.

This week on the CLL Society website we are posting news and educational material that relates in one way or another to chemotherapy, alone, in combos, and in trials.

We are adding another of my treatment monologues. This time I discuss what really is chemotherapy and how does it fit into the rapidly changing treatment paradigms for CLL. Spoiler alert: The key point here is that everything is changing, very fast. You can find that link here in the treatment section of the CLL Society website.

This is a good basic primer on what chemo is and isn't. The feedback from the earlier readers has been most gratifying. Please let me know what you think.

Just to emphasize the point of change coming, on June 4, 2015 the results of the final analysis of the Phase III RESONATE-2 were released comparing ibrutinib to chlorambucil in over-65 treatment-naïve patients, excluding those patients with deletion 17p. The big news is not that ibrutinib met its primary endpoint of better progression free survival (PFS) and secondary endpoints of better overall survival (OS) and overall response rate (ORR) as we might have predicted that based on the significant difference in the usual historical efficacy of the two drugs tested in prior trials. What is important about this Phase III trial for patients is that it is an important step towards getting FDA approval of ibrutinib as frontline therapy for those of us over 65.  The official press release can be found here and my commentary will be up on the CLL Society website on Wednesday, June 10, 2015 in the news section.

Finally, we share the good news that Quebec, home to my alma mater, McGill University, and often the leader in new therapies in Canada, is the first province to approve the use of obinituzumab (O) or Gazyva in combination with that same chlorambucil (C). On June 2, 2015, there was similar approval for patients in England and Wales. These two approvals on both sides of the Atlantic were based on the trial reported in NEJM in 2014 that demonstrated the superiority of the C-O over C-R (rituximab) or C alone in frailer patients with co-morbidities. That story and links to the original research can be found in the news section on Friday, June 12, 2015.

In our ongoing emphasis to consider clinical trials when making treatment decisions, we fielded another survey to explore search functions that CLL patients would want available in a CLL-specific Clinical Trials Search Engine. We're thankful to those patients and caregivers that took the time to complete the survey at the CLL Society booth during the CLL Patient Education and Empowerment Meeting prior to the CLL Clinical Research Consortium held in San Diego, CA from April 22-23, 2015. You can view those results in the Survey Results and Clinical Trials sections of the website on Friday, also.

One last thing: If you want to share your experience about how the high cost of our cancer meds impacts your care in a way that might make a difference, please contact me to discuss how we can get the word out.

On a personal note, I am still waiting for my final lab results form OSU, so I have nothing new to share.

I don't think I can keep up the pace of 4 new posts a week, but we will try to bring you the latest news and fill in the missing gaps as best and as fast as we can.

Thanks

Stay strong

We are all in this together.

Brian Koffman

Volunteer Medical Director of the CLL Society

Blogger 

E- cancer advocate

Husband, father and grandfather

Frontline therapies In CLL (Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia)

In this lively ONCLIVE multi-part series of polite debates among four world class CLL experts (Drs. Byrd, Furman, Ma, and Kipps), I was struck by the conservative approach of the panelists to frontline therapy.

Almost all the discussion in this 13 minute segment is about chemo-immunotherapy (CIT).

Keep on mind that except for patients with 17p deletion where ibrutinib is approved, chemo-immunotherapy is all that is approved for frontline therapy. That said, we all know that many doctors including several on this panel would discuss with their patients other frontline options besides those they discuss on camera, namely FCR (fludarabine, cyclophosphamide and rituximab) or BR (bendamustine-rituximab) or chlorambucil and obinutuzumab.

Dr. Kipps points out the potential advantages of the chlorambucil and obinutuzumab in elderly patients with a less resilient bone marrow. This relatively gentle approach has achieved a 20% complete response rate and a 26.7 month mean progession free survival, much better than the other arms in the trial that lead to its approval. For the details of the study published in the NEJM please click on this link.

Drs. Byrd and Kipps talk glowingly about the very long term benefits of FCR in a small subset of patients with the best prognostic markers: mutated with no other bad prognostic indicators. This is a subject we have visited frequently visited in the past. Here Professor Hallek and I discussed this topic in this post in the context of the role of chemo-immunotherapy (CIT) way back at iwCLL 2013. I am still waiting for the published material on that low risk subgroup that is looking more and more as if they might be CURED!

In this ONCLIVE video, there is also debate on the need to complete all the cycles of FCR to get the full benefit. I fully agree with Dr. Kipps that the evidence suggests getting to MRD (minimal residual disease) negativity is what determines our prognosis and not the number of cycles it takes to get there. I quote from a Blood editorial by Sebastian Böttcher on the original research: "current investigation suggests that the number of treatment cycles also becomes irrelevant as long as MRD negativity can be attained." 
The full text of the original research is accessible here. The authors state in the abstract that:" MRD-negative patients had comparable PFS ( progression free survival) and OS (overall survival), independent of the number of courses received or interim staging. Early MRD eradication may be a desirable goal, prompting consideration of early discontinuation of treatment."

Dr. Furman hastened to point out the potential downside of chemo-immunotherapy and also that the group that did so well is a group that should do well with any therapy.

In this article from the British Journal of Hematology, we learn: "patients treated with purine nucleoside analogues (PNA) had a significantly increased risk of subsequent second LPD (5·2%) compared with patients who had not received PNA (1·9%; P = 0·008)"  PNA are drugs such as fludarabine and LPD are lymphoid cancers.  In fact, they go to stated that the only factor found to be associated with an increased risk of a secondary lymphoma for those us with CLL was prior treatment with chemotherapy.

That certainly does give one pause.

There is also some very interesting comparison of BR versus FCR, a subject that we extensively reviewed in this prior blog post with Dr. Jeff Sharman.  I appreciate Dr. Kipps' careful analysis of the different arms of the trial to ensure that we are really comparing apples to apples.

Give a listen and please share your comments.

Again, thank you ONCLIVE for bringing us this great panel discussion.

ASH 2013: Dr. Jeff Sharman Discusses FCR versus BR in Front Line CLL

In this interview, Dr. Jeff Sharman gives us some understanding of the important trial data presented at ASH 2013 that compares FCR (fludarabine, cyclophosphamide, rituximab), the gold standard chemo-immunotherapy (CIT) to BR (bendamusine-rituximab) the new kid on the block and very popular with community oncologists.

In the excitement and promise of the new era of gentler and more effective oral medications for CLL, there is still a diminishing group of patients that for many reasons will continue to chose a chemo-immunotherapy (CIT) approach.

One possible reason is that for a few patients with excellent prognostic factors, a significant subset of those will reach MRD negativity and for that group FCR produces exceedingly durable remissions, starting to hint a possible cure. A half year of harsh but not the worst therapy, and you're done. Time to get on with your life without any daily pill reminding you that you have CLL.

Professor Hallek discusses this special group in my short interview from iwCLL last year.  I would not be completely dismissive of the value of CIT in those special circumstances.

Sadly insurance coverage and expense will be another reason that we will still see chemo. Older drugs are cheaper than newer drugs.

And even more sadly, patients' and physicians' unawareness of the rapidly changing therapeutic landscape will limit some of us CLLer's option to what our oncologist is most comfortable with it.

A few of us won't be able to tolerate the new oral therapies due to side effects, but as more options and new TKI's are approved I suspect that will be a vanishing small number. There are also the very few patients who have progressed on ibrutinib (the only oral TKI approved for CLL at this time and available by prescription) and an unfortunate group of us who both can not qualify for a trial or who have no access to the new meds because of where they live or their insurance and who need treatment NOW and can not wait for a different option.

That said, the FCR versus BR data welcomed as it is, is hardly the blockbuster news that it would have been a few years ago.

Ibrutinib and idelalisib and ABT-199 and obinutuzumab and others have rightly stolen the spotlight at ASH and elsewhere. Their time has come, and not a moment too soon.

Still CIT is not going to quietly fade away so fast so let's look at this important ASH abstract.

This link gives the data.

This link explains what is meant by the grade of adverse events and reminds us that a grade 3 adverse event is severe or disabling, a grade 4 is life threatening and a grade 5 adverse event is polite medical talk for a side effect that kills the patients. So when we see that on the FCR, we patients had a 90% of a Grade 3 or worst hematologic side effect compared to only two out of three in the BR arm.

The price of this higher that high toxicity and small but real risk of dying from FCR was an impressive 98% overall (ORR) response rate with nearly half of those being CR (complete responses). With BR the ORR is the same but the CR is 38%. MRD (minimal residual disease) negative data was not presented. Progression free survival was better for FCR in those under 65 years old, but not in the older group.

So very impressive results, but significant toxicity. This is an old and too common story with chemo: The more toxic the drug, the better it works. FCR is better in younger patients, but comes with more risks and misery.

New targeted and biological therapies break this paradigm and that is why when we have a choice, we should be putting the emerging therapies high on lists of options.

Remember too that this trial was for front line therapy in fit patients where access to the newer treatments in even more difficult.

Listen to Dr. Jeff Sharman and get his take on this important study. Dr. Sharman is a smart, very busy and compassionate guy who has done much to help the CLL and other blood cancer community and I am grateful for the time he gave for this interview at ASH 2013.



Dr. Sharman has an excellent blog himself where he covers much of the same and even more detail on the trial here.

iwCLL 2013: Prof Hallek Discusses a Focused Role of Chemo-Immunotherapy

In this brief second part of a three part interview from iwCLL 2013, Professor Hallek precisely defines the populations that do well with chemo-immunotherapy.

It is important to keep in mind that it was only with the addition of rituximab, an anti- CD20 monoclonal antibody,  to a chemo backbone of FC, comprising together the "gold standard" therapy of FRC, that a survival advantage was first shown. Prior to the German study presented at ASH only a few years ago that proved FCR prolonged lives, no therapy had been shown to help us live a day longer.

At iwCLL 2013, we learn some very important new wrinkles on exactly who it is that benefits from FRC.

There should be no debate that the role of CIT (chemo-immonotherapy such as FCR or Bendamustine -Rituximab or BR) is shrinking. Who benefits is a shrinking pool of CLL patients with very specific demographics and FISH findings and the good news that they are mutated. This argues strongly that we should never consider FCR without first knowing our mutation status and our FISH results.

The debate is whether there is any role at all for CIT even in that select population.

The question how intense the CIT protocol should be or what is best approach may soon be moot with all the new kinase inhibitors changing everything, but at ASH 2013 a few months later we did learn that FCR has deeper longer remissions than BR but at the price of more toxicities, so the answer is as always in CLL: It depends on the patient. More on this ASH abstract later

Listen to Professor Hallek discuss who should consider CIT and who should not.

iwCLL 2013: Dr. Tom Kipps Discusses the Changing Role of Chemo-immunotherapy in CLL and the New Role of BCL-2 Blockers

Dr. Tom Kipps is my personal CLL physician and was announced the winner of the prestigious Binet-Rai award for his contribution to CLL research at the iwCLL 2013 meeting.

This interview from a few months ago provides important background to help understand and get perspective on the great news from ASH 2013 on ABT-199 that I will be reporting and analyzing here soon with the help of the many of the doctors who actually lead the research.

In the first part of this interview with Dr. Kipps in Cologne, Germany, he first lays out some of the groundwork of when not to use chemotherapy.

Next, he gives us some of the history of how BCL-2 blockers work. I love his cathedral and buttress analogy especially after walking through the beautiful and delicate cathedral in Cologne. It seems like only yesterday that I was there working at the iwCLL meeting and visiting the sights when I got a break.

Cologne Cathedral

Next he explains the risks of tumor lysis syndrome. Two deaths about a year ago that halted the trial for months. But it has restarted on was reported on at ASH.

And he touches us on the tricky area of how and when can we stop these meds.



Due to a technical glitch, the final part of Dr. Byrd's interview will have to wait.

I will be mixing videos and analysis from iwCLL and ASH over the next several weeks. So much to share.

ASCO 2013: A Call for New Ways of Thinking

LIVE from ASCO 2013

It's huge.
It's crazy.
It's crowded.

But boy is there a ton of new research to share.

While ibrutinib and idelalisib have kicked open the door to explore new less toxic pathways to control not just CLL, not other B cell cancer, they did not close the door behind them.

Novel pathway inhibitors beyond PI3K and BTK and BCL-2 are being explored and being explored in novel ways with more open access.

New and potentially potent BTK and PI3K inhibitors are in trials now.

Combinations are being considered.

Dr. Wiestner said these new drugs offer us the opportunity to think in new ways.

Hence my disappointment when I hear speakers rightly celebrate the lack of bone marrow suppression with these new targeted therapies, but then got all excited about how that allows them to pile on the old school  bone marrow damaging chemotherapy. Maybe we do need to go in that direction, but can't we try to leverage the low toxicity of these drugs but adding other low toxicity agents to them, offering patients like us gentler and less risky control of our disease.

I like the idea of adding together more than one TKI or adding a monoclonal antibody or an IMID.

In my book, adding in bendamustine or fludarabine or chlorambucil or their ilk should make a significant difference in outcomes to justify the additional downside risk.  

I understand the temptation to revert to tried and true paths. And it might turn out to be the best call. Medicine must be both conservative and progressive.

But we have a sea change, a paradigm shift, happening in CLL. Let's try to keep innovating and exploring using the kind of thinking that got us the breakthroughs with  ibrutinib and idelalisb and ABT-199.

That is the next stage of research that has me excited.

That is the future that I want for all of us.

ASH 2012: Dr. David P Steensma: Myelodysplastic Syndrome with a Focus on Secondary MDS in CLL

Dr. David Steensma is a world leader in not only basic laboratory and clinical research on MDS, but also in examining the impact that anemia has on the life of older patients.

MDS or myelodysplastic syndrome is bone marrow failure and in a minority cases, turns into an acute leukemia.

It is not an uncommon complication of CLL, both, as Dr. Steensma explains, secondary to the genetic and epigenetic changes inherent in the disease itself, and to the treatments, especially the alkylating agents that damage the DNA. In CLL, these included chlorambucil (Leukeran), cyclophosphamide (Cytoxan or the C in FCR), and bendamustine (Treanda).

This is a strong argument for younger patients to avoid those drugs known to damage the bone marrow, but Dr. Steensma offers some more subtle analysis and advice.

We also discuss the radiation risk of MDS from all those CT scans we get in clinical trials.

A good friend of mine is now more than two years out post transplant at MDACC for his CLL/MDS combo one-two knockout punch and he is doing great with no molecular evidence of either disease (MRD negative). And very little graft versus disease.  You can read his story at this link.

This is my last video interview from ASH 2012, but ASCO is just around the corner with more news and interviews.

Dr. Steensma clarifies and explains the risk of MDS in simple terms.

Einstein is quoted as saying: "Make things as simple as possible, but not simpler."

Dr. Steensma does exactly that.

Ibrutinib Research from Dr. Wiestner at the NIH

Below is the press release (PR) from the recent meeting in Washington, DC of the AACR (American Assoc. of Cancer Research) concerning the research by Dr. Wiestner's group at the NIH.

There are a number of things to keep in mind when reading the PR.

First that 29 of 53 patients were 17p del and 30 were relapsed or refractory. These were not the easiest patients to treat.

Second remember this was ibrutinib flying solo. No help from bendamustine or an antibody.

Third this is still early data. We don't know the durability of these fantastic results.

Finally , we learn that the drug is active in all lymphocyte compartments, the blood, the lymph nodes, the spleen, and the marrow.

Please take a look of this data in light of Dr. Wiestner's recent plea that we carefully reassess whether we need to continue with business as usual by insisting more is better and pushing for the "ideal chemo cocktail."

Rather I believe that these new targeted therapies demand that we fully reassess how we treat CLL and we don't just add these molecules to the existing mixes, effective as they are, but  rather we see what they can do on their own, and make slow and logical decisions about what combinations (if any) to consider. 

I like the idea of totally avoiding old school chemo if possible, but only time will tell if that is the wisest approach.

Even mixing two pathway blockers, while mechanistically appealing, is totally unknown territory.

One reason I fear that one reason that chemo or biologicals such as rituximab might get added to these trials (especially true for the very potent and active idelalisib or CAL 101 that where the high counts might linger a bit longer) is that the benign spike seen in the absolute lymphocyte count as the B lymphocyte clone cells exit their protective enclaves in the nodes and marrow and enter the blood stream where they can be counted, may last a long time and makes the early data look weak. Those raised numbers suggest the drug is not working to the uninitiated and it takes works to explain the back story. We all know that is not the case and they are in fact potent therapies, but adding chemo or a mAb solves that short term concern and speeds up the data collection. My questions are: Does it really improve outcome? Does it add unnecessary risk?

Truth is we don't know the answers. That is why we need the trials, but the reported 94% event free survival at 1 year as solo therapy is hard to improve on.

Here is the press release from AACR:

Embargoed for Release:                                                    Media Contact:

1 p.m. ET, April 8, 2013                                                      Jeremy Moore

                                                                                               (215) 446-7109

                                                                                               Jeremy.Moore@aacr.org

                                                                                               In Washington, D.C.
April 6-10, 2013:
(202) 249-4005

Ibrutinib Safe, Effective Against Untreated, Relapsed and Unresponsive Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia

·      Ibrutinib disrupts the CLL-driving B-cell receptor signaling pathway.

·      Phase II trial showed the drug was well tolerated and effective against CLL regardless of del 17p status.

·      The drug was effective against disease in blood, lymph nodes, spleen and bone marrow.

WASHINGTON, D.C. — The novel drug ibrutinib was well tolerated and highly effective in patients with untreated, relapsed and unresponsive chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL), according to phase II data presented at the AACR Annual Meeting 2013, held in Washington, D.C., April 6-10.

“The degree of tumor reduction achieved by once-daily oral therapy was impressive,” said Adrian Wiestner, M.D., Ph.D., investigator and head of the Lymphoid Malignancies Section in the Hematology Branch at the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Md. “We have seen patients with more than 90 percent reduction of lymph node disease within just two months.” 

Many elderly patients with CLL are unable to tolerate current aggressive standard therapies, and those with a deletion in the short arm of chromosome 17, referred to as “del 17p,” have particularly poor outcomes with chemotherapy. These two CLL patient populations that are enrolled in the NIH phase II study have the greatest need for novel treatment therapies, according to Wiestner.

Ibrutinib is a selective inhibitor of Bruton’s tyrosine kinase, a component of the B-cell receptor signaling pathway that plays a key role in the development and progression of CLL. This study confirms the single-agent antileukemia activity seen in prior phase I/II studies and extends this experience, particularly in del 17p CLL, according to Wiestner.

He and his colleagues enrolled 53 patients with CLL into two cohorts — 29 patients with del 17p and 24 patients without del 17p who were aged 65 years or older. They assigned all patients to 420 mg of ibrutinib daily and evaluated response to the drug at six months and every six months thereafter, until disease progression.

Most adverse events were mild or moderate and included diarrhea, fatigue and rash, severe events occurred in less than 13 percent of the patients.

At six months, 95 percent of patients showed at least a 50 percent reduction in lymph node disease, and all showed reduction in spleen enlargement, with a median reduction of 55 percent. In 26 patients for whom a bone marrow biopsy was done, tumor infiltration decreased by 82 percent. Absolute lymphocyte count decreased by a median of 62 percent. Using standard CLL response criteria, 52 percent of patients had a partial response. At 12 months, the estimated event-free survival rate was 94 percent.

Using blood and tissue samples of lymph nodes collected from 15 patients before and during ibrutinib treatment, Wiestner and his colleagues showed effective inhibition of B-cell receptor signaling and tumor proliferation, which was reduced by more than 80 percent, as measured by Ki67 staining.

“Ibrutinib was highly efficacious as a single agent in patients with untreated, relapsed and unresponsive CLL, irrespective of their del 17p status,” Wiestner said. “Responses appear to be durable, and the drug is effective against the disease in lymph nodes, spleen and bone marrow. This is important because existing therapies often fail to effectively eliminate cancer cells in these tissue sites. Targeted therapy for CLL is becoming a reality, and this new approach will greatly improve the lives of patients with this disease.”

This research was supported by the Intramural Research Program of the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute at the NIH.

 

# # #

Press registration for the AACR Annual Meeting 2013 is free to qualified journalists and public information officers: www.aacr.org/PressRegistration.

Follow the AACR on Twitter: @aacr #aacr
Follow the AACR on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/aacr.org

About the American Association for Cancer Research

Founded in 1907, the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) is the world’s first and largest professional organization dedicated to advancing cancer research and its mission to prevent and cure cancer. AACR membership includes more than 34,000 laboratory, translational and clinical researchers; population scientists; other health care professionals; and cancer advocates residing in more than 90 countries. The AACR marshals the full spectrum of expertise of the cancer community to accelerate progress in the prevention, biology, diagnosis and treatment of cancer by annually convening more than 20 conferences and educational workshops, the largest of which is the AACR Annual Meeting with more than 17,000 attendees. In addition, the AACR publishes eight peer-reviewed scientific journals and a magazine for cancer survivors, patients and their caregivers. The AACR funds meritorious research directly as well as in cooperation with numerous cancer organizations. As the scientific partner of Stand Up To Cancer, the AACR provides expert peer review, grants administration and scientific oversight of team science and individual grants in cancer research that have the potential for near-term patient benefit. The AACR actively communicates with legislators and policymakers about the value of cancer research and related biomedical science in saving lives from cancer. For more information about the AACR, visit www.AACR.org. 

On a personal note, I am just back from a wonderful, meaningful high school reunion held in Vancouver, BC  though we all went to an all boys school in Toronto (UTS) three thousand miles away. I am hoping to do one of my personal reflective posts soon, but  because of the important breaking news and backlog of interviews, I have been weak on telling my CLL and life story that is happily boringly stable these days. 

Later this week I will be lecturing in Orlando, Florida. 

No rest.