MONTHLY QUIZ: B lymphocytes that cause CLL can proliferate in all the following areas of the body except:
- The lymph nodes and the spleen
- The bloodstream
- The bone marrow
ANSWER: The correct answer is # 2. CLL is a cancer of the B lymphocytes. Therefore, it is both a leukemia and lymphoma. The cancer cells accumulate in the blood, making it leukemia with high lymphocyte counts. However, they can both accumulate and proliferate in the nodes, bone marrow, and the spleen. They cannot reproduce in the blood.
NEWS:
- September is Blood Cancer Awareness Month, starting with World CLL Day on the 1st. Follow us on social media as we highlight programs and resources to support those with CLL and their loved ones.
- CLL Society’s 2024 Annual Report is now available online. It highlights our significant achievements in ensuring everyone with CLL gets the best care. We extend our deepest gratitude for your partnership on this journey.
- Join CLL Society for our next webinar, Understanding Medicare and CLL: What Patients Need to Know with Saira Sultan.
- The newest episode of the CLL Society Podcast, CareCast, is now live! In this conversation, young mother and CLL patient Lexii Freitas joins CLL Society’s Sarah Castro to share her journey of resilience, self-advocacy, and hope while navigating life with a lifechanging diagnosis.
- CLL Society Chief Medical Officer and EVP, Dr. Koffman, will be cochairing a session at the important iwCLL Conference on Health Maintenance for Patients With CLL.
BASICS: Types of CLL Treatment – This month, we begin describing broad therapy categories.
Chemo-immunotherapy (CIT) used to be the only treatment for CLL. Today, depending on which CLL expert you consult, there would be no role or at most a very limited role for a few frontline patients as it has been repeatedly proven to be inferior to newer targeted therapies. Sadly, it is still being used too often in the community, in up to 15-20% of all patients. CLL Society is trying to change this through educating patients and oncologists.
CIT consists of chemo drugs that damage the cell’s DNA and non-specifically kill anything that grows quickly, such as cancer cells, skin, hair, gut, and normal blood cells. In CLL, common drugs are fludarabine (F), cyclophosphamide (C), bendamustine (B), chlorambucil and more rarely pentostatin. Chemo is more effective when combined with immunotherapy (IT). Usually, a monoclonal antibody (mAb): rituximab (R) or obinutuzumab (Gazyva) that targets a specific marker (CD20) found only on CLL and normal B cells. Common CIT combinations are FCR, BR, and chlorambucil plus obinutuzumab. There is NO role for chemotherapy alone to treat CLL, though that too is still used by some hematologists.
WORD/ACRONYM OF THE MONTH: CD
CD or Clusters of Differentiation are proteins on the cell surface used by flow cytometry (cellular fingerprinting) to diagnose CLL or find measurable (minimal) residual disease (MRD). Classically, these surface markers identify CLL cells: CD5, CD19, CD20(dim), CD23, and an absence of FMC-7. CDs are also targets for antibodies and CAR-T. For example, rituximab, obinutuzumab, and the experimental epcoritamab target CD20 while the CAR-T liso-cel targets CD19.
The CLL Society is invested in your long life. Please invest in the long life of the CLL Society.
