May 18, 2015

Friends,

This week’s new posts on the CLL Society website will be commentary and interviews from important blood conferences at the end of 2014 focusing on ibrutinib and other similar drugs that block the BTK pathways.

Although done a month apart with the first in November in Greece at ESH or European School of Hematology and the second in December in San Francisco at ASH or American Society of Hematology, they form a nice unit and should be of interest to anyone on ibrutinib or considering it or any of the similar drugs.

Dr. Jennifer Brown out of Dana Farber starts us off by discussing what’s happening and what needs to happen in second-generation BTK inhibitors to improve on ibrutinib. You can view that interview here.

Next Dr. Jan Burger from MD Anderson outlines some of what is known about resistance to ibrutinib (view interview here) and the rationale for his open trial of ibrutinib combined with rituximab. View that interview here.

As always, the interviews with all the background and the links to the trials mentioned and abstracts will be posted on the website under conference coverage, past years (http://cllsociety.org/category/conference-coverage/) on Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

Stay strong

We are all in this together

Brian Koffman, MD   May 18, 2015