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EHA 2026 | Looking towards a cure in CLL
Matthew Davids, MD, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Boston, MA, discusses the concept of a cure in chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) and notes that while current therapies outside of allogeneic stem cell transplantation are not curative, he is optimistic that combining novel treatments may lead to a cure for a subset of patients. Dr Davids highlights that the goal of cure is more relevant for young, fit patients with high-genetic-risk disease, whereas for older patients with low-risk genetics, controlling the disease and extending life with good quality of life is a more reasonable objective. This interview took place at the 31st Congress of the European Hematology Association (EHA) in Stockholm, Sweden.
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Transcript
So in CLL to date we really have not had curative therapies really outside of the allogeneic transplantation experience. But that does not mean that CLL is completely incurable and I’m really optimistic now that we have so many different effective tools that if we find the right combinations we may be able to cure a subset of patients with CLL. Now there’s a lot of patients with CLL where we don’t necessarily need to cure them...
So in CLL to date we really have not had curative therapies really outside of the allogeneic transplantation experience. But that does not mean that CLL is completely incurable and I’m really optimistic now that we have so many different effective tools that if we find the right combinations we may be able to cure a subset of patients with CLL. Now there’s a lot of patients with CLL where we don’t necessarily need to cure them. So our older patients, especially those with low-risk genetics, we have some very effective therapies already that we can control the disease, we can extend their life with good quality of life, and I think that’s a very reasonable goal for that population. On the other hand, we do still have young, fit patients with CLL, and particularly those with high-genetic-risk disease, And I’m not confident yet that with the tools that we have, we’d be able to extend their life to live whatever their normal lifespan should be. So when we talk about cure in CLL, that’s really the group that I’m thinking about, the younger fit patients with high risk genetics. And I’m optimistic now that we have some of the more immune-based therapies coming into CLL, like CAR T-cells and bispecific antibodies, that we might be able to find a subset of patients that we can cure using combinations of those different immune-based therapies, because allogeneic transplant, again, was sort of the precedent for curing CLL. So if we have more effective immune-based therapies for CLL with less toxicity than allogeneic transplant, I think that could potentially be a pathway toward cure.
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