iwCLL 2025 | Investigating the impact of interrupting BTKi therapy on vaccine response in patients with CLL

So the IMPROVE study is a study that was run by my colleague Helen Parry from the University of Birmingham. It was a study that was trying to prove the concept of vaccine response in patients who were treated with BTK inhibitors. So the idea of the study was to interrupt the BTK inhibitor for a few weeks before the patients were vaccinated against COVID, trying to improve the vaccine response by interrupting the drug, hoping to have an improvement of T-cell function by the time the vaccine was inoculated in the patient’s body. Unfortunately, it was a negative study that doesn’t negate the value of it because we kind of know that now for the future and there’s no value of interrupting BTK inhibitors in order to improve vaccine response. But there are some other following studies that have come with the IMPROVE study in terms of how the T-cell function recovery happens after you stop the drug and the relative factors that play into the vaccine response of patients with CLL. And there are some other interesting observations, for example, the proportion of healthy B-cells and the subset of those B-cells within the different repertoire, which dictates how patients will respond to vaccines. So that might help us to guide the viral vaccination strategies in the future, regardless of whether you stop the treatment or not.

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