Our recent CLL Global Research Foundation Town Hall featured CLL Global President, Dr. William Wierda, and Dr. Alessandra Ferrajoli, from The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. Watch the full webinar.
Expert Panel:
Dr. William Wierda, President & CEO, CLL Global Research Foundation
Dr. Alessandra Ferrajoli, The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center
Transcript
Jamie Forward:
So, Dr. Wierda, is there any progress with immune reconstitution? Is it being worked on?
Dr. William Wierda:
There haven’t been any strategies yet that have been identified for immune restoration or reconstitution.
The one strategy that we have used for several years now is for patients who have low antibody levels and have infections. If their IgG level is less than 500, they are candidates for replacement IgG with IVIG. Those are infusions given once a month. They’re usually most helpful during the winter months when we’re at greatest risk for viral infections etcetera. We have a group at Anderson that we’re working with, laboratory colleagues doing corelative studies to understand what are the mechanisms of immune dysfunction in patients with CLL?
And the next step will be to identify strategies to correct those features that are abnormal as strategies to have immune restoration.
It’s been interesting to me; we have very effective treatments these days to get most of our patients undetectable with regard to CLL good deep remissions. Despite the fact that they’re in a good deep remission, we typically don’t see immune restoration back to normal; for sure not right away, and sometimes it takes years for immune restoration to occur, so patients are at persistent risks for infections and second cancers. So, this is a great area of interest for me and something that I’m spending a lot of time thinking about and working on.