Less Than A Quarter of Patients With CLL Tested for IGHV Mutation Prior to Initial Therapy

The following article features coverage from the 2017 American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) Annual Meeting in Chicago, Illinois. Click here to read more of Cancer Therapy Advisor‘s conference coverage.

Immunoglobulin heavy chain variable region (IGHV) mutation–testing, which can indicate which patients with chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) have a better prognosis, is conducted among only 21% of patients treated with bendamustine plus rituximab, according to data presented at the 2017 American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) meeting in Chicago, Illinois.¹

CLL, estimated to be diagnosed among about 20,000 people in the United States in 2017, can be treated with bendamustine plus rituximab in the first-line setting if patients do not have 17p deletion.

For this study, researchers analyzed patient information from the Flatiron Health electronic database to determine features of “real world” patients with CLL treated with bendamustine plus rituximab.

Of 2736 patients with CLL in this database, which includes 1.5 million patients with cancer across 250 clinics, 738 were treated with bendamustine plus rituximab in the first line.

Of patients treated with bendamustine plus rituximab in the first line, 70% were male and the average age was 68.71 years.

Only 21% of these patients underwent IGHV mutation–testing prior to initiating therapy; 46% of tested patients were IGHV-mutated.

Only 60% of patients underwent fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH) testing prior to initiating therapy. Eight percent of these patients had 17p deletion and 19% had 11q deletion.

RELATED: Dabrafenib Plus Trametinib Promising in Melanoma

The authors concluded that “the low frequency of testing prior to first-line therapy is similar to other published registry data. This representative patient population offers an insight into the real-world use of [bendamustine plus rituximab] in CLL patients.”

Read more of Cancer Therapy Advisor‘s coverage of the 2017 American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) Annual Meeting by visiting the conference page.

Reference

1. Tang B, Gabriel S, Pathak AK, Brander DM, Zhou J. Clinical and demographic characteristics of CLL patients receiving first-line bendamustine plus rituximab using the Flatiron Health database. J Clin Oncol. 2017;35(suppl; abstr e19010).