Page 19 - Haematologica July

Editorials
it clear that many patients do not tolerate extended thera- py. A multicenter retrospective analysis of 616 ibrutinib- treated patients reported a 41% discontinuation rate with a median time to ibrutinib discontinuation of seven months.5 The predominant cause of discontinuation was toxicity, including atrial fibrillation, arthralgia, rash, infec- tion and pneumonitis. The median PFS for the entire cohort of predominantly relapsed patients was 36 months, as compared to the recently reported 51-month median PFS in the phase Ib/II ibrutinib clinical trial.6 Additionally, with more mature follow up of the ibrutinib clinical trials, discontinuation rates are rising and are beginning to look more similar to the earlier real-world data. In the admit- tedly small previously untreated cohort of the phase Ib/II study,6 the discontinuation rate has reached 45% at five years, although PFS is 92%, indicating that these discon- tinuations are not predominantly due to progressive dis- ease. More frequent discontinuation, dose holds and dose reductions seem likely to explain some of the differences in outcome between ibrutinib clinical trials and real-world reports.
The real-world analysis presented by Cuneo et al.1 focuses on an interesting CLL patient niche that has per- haps been neglected, namely those receiving first salvage therapy. These patients are often pooled with more heav- ily pre-treated patients, making it difficult to assess their outcomes. The BR population in this study has a median age of 70 years and is reasonably healthy based on Eastern Cooperative Oncology Group (ECOG) performance sta- tus, comorbidities and creatinine clearance.1 Their disease, however, is advanced, with 78.6% in advanced stage, 91% with bulky lymphadenopathy, and 73% with unmu- tated IGHV. High-risk FISH is relatively limited at 20.8% with del(11q) and 12.6% with del(17p), although approx- imately half had progressed within 36 months of their prior therapy. In comparison to the ibrutinib arm of RES- ONATE, for example, these patients are much less heavily pre-treated and at much lower risk according to FISH, yet have more advanced disease according to stage and bulk. Despite the latter, and likely related to the former, they did well with BR, with a median PFS of 25 months that compares favorably to the previously reported 15-18- month PFS for BR in the first or second salvage settings.7,8 As expected, PFS was worse for genetically higher risk patients, but reached 40.4 months in those without del(17p), with mutated IGHV, and Rai stage 0-2 disease.
The overall analysis, and particularly the comparison to ibrutinib, is certainly limited by its retrospective nature and potential differences in the patient populations under comparison. For the comparative analysis, Cuneo et al.1 wisely chose to focus on patients without del(17p) who had had front-line CIT, and in doing so the cohorts were statistically comparable for age, ECOG, response to first- line therapy, and IGHV, although the ibrutinib cohort still had more patients with less than 36 months from first-line therapy (76.1% vs. 59.1%). Furthermore, the ibrutinib cohort also showed a trend to more ECOG-2 patients: 17.4%, compared to 8.1% in the BR cohort. The former had an estimated 2-year OS of 35%, much less than the 73% OS of ibrutinib-treated ECOG 0-1 patients. In this context, a detailed listing of the causes of death among the ibrutinib-treated patients would be helpful. In addition,
the ibrutinib cohort in particular is quite small, and several early deaths due to infection or Richter’s syndrome, of unclear relationship to ibrutinib, may also have affected the OS curve. While these differences certainly confound the results, nonetheless the findings are provocative in demonstrating comparable OS between second-line ibru- tinib and BR in two approximately matched real-world patient populations.
Despite its limitations, the Cuneo et al.1 study demon- strates that six months of CIT can be very effective sec- ond-line therapy in appropriate patients, and challenges the increasingly widespread belief that if ibrutinib is not used first line, it should certainly be used second line. Ibrutinib’s initial overwhelming efficacy was evident par- ticularly among very heavily pre-treated patients with 17p and 11q deletions9 whose response to traditional CIT is dismal. The Authors of this paper note that the real-world data with ibrutinib show similar duration of therapy and benefit in first versus later relapses, suggesting that relative ibrutinib benefit in the real world is greater in more heav- ily pre-treated patients. I would agree that the still limited data currently available generally support this claim, although the relative proportion of discontinuations for disease progression is higher in later line patients, and it is hard to ignore the clinical trial results demonstrating longer PFS in less heavily pre-treated patients, at least in the relapsed setting.10 In a cross-trial comparison per- formed with 24-month follow up and excluding del(17p) patients, the PFS was similar for first-line patients in RES- ONATE-2 to that of second-line patients in RESONATE,11 but better than that of later line RESONATE patients. A further issue raised by the clinical trial data is whether ibrutinib or idelalisib should be added if later-line BR were given, since the addition of either drug improved PFS and possibly OS among a more heavily pre-treated higher risk patient population.12,13 Further complicating this landscape are the recently reported MURANO data in which vene- toclax-rituximab greatly improved PFS compared to BR in relapsed CLL patients, most of whom had one prior ther- apy, albeit with a higher risk profile including del(17p) and TP53 mutation.14
How then to reconcile the clinical trial and real-world data, while also taking into account patient preference for time-limited therapy and cost considerations? Notably absent from this discussion has been a deeper focus on risk stratification as well as individualized patient man- agement, including comorbidities and performance status, in selecting therapy. The relative benefit of ibrutinib and other novel agents is certainly greatest in higher risk dis- ease, and, at least with ibrutinib, among patients able to remain on drug for extended times. Yet to date, only del(17p) has been widely accepted as altering therapy choice and trial design, with the result that most of our CLL trials enroll a broad patient population which may not be well stratified for disease risk or directly compara- ble to the population enrolled on other studies or seen in our clinics. The most important example here is IGHV mutation status, which clearly predicts long-term benefit from FCR CIT,15-17 yet has not been widely incorporated into our thinking about relapsed or older patients, despite evidence, as in this paper,1 that the mutated subgroup can often respond well to a diversity of therapies.
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