EHA 2026 | Key CLL advances from EHA 2026: venetoclax and beyond

“So I’m really excited to be at the European Hematology Association meeting, and I think that some of the data presented here is actually not presented at ASCO, which was nice to see. Some of the best things at this meeting I’ve seen so far was yesterday we got to see follow-up of some frontline trials that have been going on for a long time. So we saw follow-up of CLL14 out to nine years and then follow-up of CLL13. So that was really interesting. And also to see the subgroup analysis there. So in CLL14, we’re seeing still like outstanding results. And as we kind of knew patients with deletion 17p CLL have a shorter PFS, you’re seeing this really durable remission in IGHV mutated CLL patients. So it’s just nice to see that at long-term follow-up and the continued benefit. And for me too, just seeing that there’s the PFS, but then the time to next treatment is even beyond that, which really supports that these fixed duration initial regimens can be valuable. And I thought the CLL13 follow-up also had a lot of the same messages for what was happening with the patients. And that study, for anyone that’s not familiar with what it is, CLL14 is the venetoclax obinutuzumab versus chlorambucil obinutuzumab. 13 actually is four arms, but one of them is venetoclax rituximab and one is venetoclax obinutuzumab. And you’re really seeing that obinutuzumab arm just keeps doing much better than the rituximab one with venetoclax with like longer, longer follow-up. So I think that really supports just venetoclax being a markedly better antibody in CLL. So I enjoyed seeing that. And then of course, there was some great data looking at sotoroclax and zanabrutinib in combination. So the follow-up looks good, the results look good, and there’s a phase three trial hopefully we’ll get results of at some point comparing that strategy of the BCL2 inhibitor sotoroclax with the BTK inhibitor zanabrutinib for fixed duration to obinutuzumab and venetoclax. So just seeing this additional safety and response data for that combination makes me even more excited to see that results of the phase three study whenever we get that information. So I think so far, those were my highlights. Tomorrow, we should see the results of the venetoclax and rituximab versus pirtobrutinib, venetoclax, rituximab, and previously treated CLL. So that’s something I definitely look forward to, but since that hasn’t happened yet, I don’t really have any take-homes yet.

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