Ibrutinib Plus Umbralisib Induce Survival Benefit in Patients With CLL

Matthew Davids, MD, MMSc, an associate director with the Center for Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia; director of clinical research, Lymphoma Program; and medical oncologist, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and an assistant professor of medicine with Harvard Medical School, discusses the longer-term follow-up data from the phase 3 UNITY-CLL clinical trial, which evaluated umbralisib (TGR-1202) in combination with ibrutinib (Imbruvica) as treatment of patients with chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL).

The results, which were presented during the 2020 European Hematology Association Congress, demonstrated that complete responses increased overtime, showing that the initial results observed in the study were holding up for patients with CLL. These patients are having really good durability of these responses, says Davids. There were also higher rates of complete remission that investigators expected for the combination compared with ibrutinib on its own.

Davids says that there is an argument in the field about whether complete remission matters in patients who are on a continuous therapy, but he believes the data are supportive of the possibility that getting into deeper remissions can sustain remissions longer, as what’s been observed in the impressive progression-free survival and overall survival data. However, longer-term follow-up is needed to know for certain, as well as comparative studies to answer that question more definitively.

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