Dr. Kipps Discusses CLL Treatment in the Community Setting

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At the 2014 American Society of Hematology annual meeting in San Francisco, Dr. Thomas Kipps from the Moores Cancer Center at UCSD presented an abstract that provided data from the Connect CLL Registry Study which analyzed how patients with chronic lymphocytic leukemia are treated in the community setting.

Take Away Points:

• More monotherapy rituximab (R) is used to treat chronic lymphocytic leukemia in community practice than at academic centers.
• Community oncologists and academic centers may be treating a different mix of patients with CLL.
• CLL therapies available tomorrow will be better than CLL therapies available today.

ASH 2014:

In the second part of the interview, Dr. Kipps outlines the reality on the ground in community practices as outlined in the Connect CLL Registry Study presented at ASH 2014. Connect^®-CLL is a US-based registry that is aimed at understanding patterns of CLL management. Patients from academic centers (10%) and community settings (90%) were included between the years of 2010 and 2014.

In the abstract above, key details about older CLL patients receiving care in the community included:

• Progressive lymphocytosis was used as the reason for initiating therapy in one out of every three patients, yet it is probably the weakest of all the indications for treatment.
• 25% of patients over 75 years old did not receive Rituximab as part of their initial therapy.
• < 3% of patients participated in frontline clinical trials.

That is another reason that team at the CLL Society is so darn insistent that we all include a CLL expert as part of our treatment team. The main reason, of course, is that there is good published research that indicates that we live longer if we have a CLL expert on our team.

Please take the time to build a team using our Build-A-Team tool.

Here is the second and final part of our interview from ASH 2014.

Dr. Brian Koffman 5/3/2015