Dr. Jennifer Brown Highlights Recent Advances in CLL Care at SOHO 2024

At the Society of Hematologic Oncology (SOHO) 2024 Annual Meeting in Houston, Texas, Blood Cancers Today spoke with SOHO immediate past president Jennifer Brown, MD, PhD, from the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School. She overviewed recent noteworthy advances in chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) management.

Dr. Brown began with the US Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) December 2023 approval for use in CLL of pirtobrutinib, a first-in-class non-covalent Bruton tyrosine kinase (BTK) inhibitor. She then discussed two promising presentations on BTK degraders for CLL treatment, given at the European Hematology Association (EHA) 2024 Hybrid Congress in Madrid, Spain.

“This is also very encouraging for another potential line of therapy, and probably the most exciting new drugs in CLL at the moment,” Dr. Brown said.

In recent years, CLL treatment with covalent BTK inhibitors and venetoclax has brought some progress in keeping more patients from transplantation. Dr. Brown noted that, although chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapy received FDA approval for CLL earlier in 2024, “it’s certainly not a homerun in CLL. It doesn’t work as well in CLL as it does in other lymphomas so far.”

She added that clinicians currently cannot predict which patients with CLL will benefit from CAR-T therapy, but there are certain data to be presented at the SOHO 2024 Annual Meeting which may bring insight on how to do so.