Remission cycles: I would discussion and feedback please

[Sagarcanada]

hello all CLL fellows and experts,

I am going to ask a very general but important in my opinion. At least for me, I assume important! I have read many posts about remission. From reading literature and posts, I understand that a CLL patient after treatment may undergo 5-6 cycles of remission cycle and the first cycle of remission would be longer and slowly the remission cycle gets shorter. Is it true? I am just wondering so I want feedback from an expert, CLL specialists, Hematologists, experienced people, or any... I am not an expert but curious ...

In one of the posts, I found from 2021 there is tremendous progress in the research of CLL so I am curious if there are some treatment options or medicines which can increase the length of the remission period.

[AussieNeil Partner Administrator]

I've seen a few clinical trial reports of patients who have undergone more than 10 treatments - and that was back when we only had the older chemoimmunotherapy treatments.

In principle, you can keep undergoing treatments, provided your CLL clone and derivative subclones, haven't become resistant to the treatment. That's one of the reasons why doublet or less often, triplet therapies are given.

It's certainly true that you get the longest remission from your first treatment of a particular treatment protocol. You can sometimes get longer remissions from a subsequent treatment - e.g. BTKi or CAR-T, if it's sufficiently different from earlier treatments.

Combined treatments with targeted therapies, have only been trialed for about 4 years, so we don't know how long repeat treatment remissions will last in comparison with the first, but I expect they won't be longer.

Neil

[Sagarcanada in reply to AussieNeil]

Thank you AussieNeil your feedback is great and useful.