ERIC CLL 2026 | Patient and hematologist treatment preferences in CLL: insights from a European qualitative study

This experience of the real-world series, looking at the patient group, was in multiple countries. What was important is that the priorities that the patients and clinicians have can diverge slightly, but overall, what we found in the study was that the treatment landscape, or the treatment effectiveness of the treatment, was the most important part of the journey for the patient as well as for the clinician. All of the patients and clinicians used different words to explain their experiences, but overall, the most important thing is how quickly we can get patients into good disease control, as well as the toxicity side of things. Where the findings were slightly different was the common side effects that patients experience, as compared to the clinicians, who are more worried about the long-term effectiveness. These were really relevant problems to the patients as well. But overall, the good thing about the study was that the main goal of the treatments really was to get durable responses with the therapies. I think the discussion with the patients will stay the same, but I think the study highlights the fact that these discussions, which we are doing in these real-world studies, also need to be happening in our normal day-to-day clinics. It will help us to decide which therapy is the best one for our patient, but at the same time, which is the therapy that the patients really want. Now, we’ve got very good therapies for CLL patients, but at the same time, we need to make sure that the patients do take the therapies and also are able to tolerate the treatments. All of these factors come into play when we are having that discussion with our patients. So, the qualitative studies are extremely important now, especially when we are seeing very durable responses in terms of the data that we are seeing in clinical trials. We need to remember that in our clinical, normal clinical trials, we are recruiting patients who are very motivated to go into a study and they also are able to tolerate the treatments that we can give. Any clinician or any researcher will know that patients need to fulfill multiple criteria to go into the study. The real-world studies are different because we are recruiting patients who may have lots of other health issues, which will preclude clinical trials for them. And if we can show that these new therapies provide the same effectiveness and less toxicity in the real-world setting, then we can apply the clinical trial data to our real-world setting and can be very clear to our patients that this is what we would expect in the real world as well for them.

This transcript is AI-generated. While we strive for accuracy, please verify this copy with the video.