Talha Munir, MD, St James's Hospital, Leeds, United Kingdom, discusses findings from an exploratory analysis of the phase 2 CLARITY trial, which he presented at the 2022 American Society of Hematology (ASH) Annual Meeting & Exposition in New Orleans, LA.

The analysis found that early minimal residual disease (MRD) eradication with ibrutinib plus venetoclax resulted in sustained MRD and clinical responses in relapsed/refractory chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL).

Transcript:

Hi, I'm Dr. Talha Munir. I'm a consultant hematologist working at St James's Hospital in Leeds, UK. It's my absolute pleasure to be here in New Orleans attending the ASH meeting, and it has been a really exciting meeting to date.

Today I presented the data on the CLARITY study for CLL in the CLL symposium. This study was primarily looking at patients with relapsed/refractory CLL, and we now have got updated data at a 5-year follow-up. Now, the data primarily shows that with this combination, the 5-year survival rates are in excess of 90% and the [progression-free survival] (PFS) for these patients was 78%.

What we saw was that the patients who achieved very deep remission in the form of MRD negativity were the patients who were benefiting the most from this combination. Some of the patients have continued ibrutinib long-term as well, and we did not see any safety signals. In short, ibrutinib in combination with venetoclax in this short, small phase 2 study is showing benefit, and the majority of the patients are progression-free at 5 years time point.

Source:

Munir T, Cherrill L, Webster N, et al. MRD4 Eradication at 6 Months and Early Clearance of MRD with Combination of Ibrutinib Plus Venetoclax Results in Sustained Clinical and MRD Responses: Exploratory Analysis of the Blood Cancer UK TAP Clarity Study. Presented at the ASH Annual Meeting & Exposition; December 10-13, 2022; New Orleans, LA, and virtual. Abstract 91.