Prognostic testing
Once a patient is diagnosed with CLL, as was the case with the 50-year-old patient Dr. Barr described, a number of tests can be considered to assess prognosis.
There’s no “perfect answer” when it comes to which tests are considered a reasonable standard of care, he noted.
“I would typically perform [immunoglobulin variable heavy-chain gene] mutation testing, a [fluorescence in situ hybridization] panel, and TP53 mutation testing,” he said.
Scoring systems such as CLL-IPI, which combine prognostic factors to divide patients into various risk categories, can be useful.
For example, such systems may identify high-risk patients who might be appropriate candidates for clinical trials, or low-risk patients who could be expected to do well over time despite having advanced stage disease, he explained.
“I do think it’s a useful process to go through to understand a patient’s risk over time,” he added.
However, treatment for CLL still is not based on molecular aberrations/prognostic features. In fact, the treatment indications according to the updated iwCLL guidelines remain exactly the same, he said.
Therefore, the case of the 50-year-old man described earlier would be observed as long as he remained asymptomatic.
Dr. Barr is a consultant for Pharmacyclics, AbbVie, Celgene, Gilead, Infinity, Novartis, and Seattle Genetics and has received research funding from Pharmacyclics and AbbVie.