Susan M. O’Brien, MD, on upcoming 2022 trends in chronic lymphocytic leukemia treatment.
Susan M. O’Brien, MD: What I’d like to see in 2022 is that at least 1 of the noncovalent inhibitors, if not both, get FDA approved. That would be very exciting. Right now, patients do need to go on a clinical trial, which is well worth their doing, but it would be nice [for those agents to be approve] because it wouldn’t be limited to clinical trials. Those 2 drugs are going to really give us a fabulous option that we don’t have now [for patients who] develop resistance to the first-generation BTK inhibitors. They appear to be amazingly nontoxic and that’s partly because, if you look at the KINOME assays, they’re very specific for BTK, particularly pirtobrutinib [LOXO-305]. Not only is it nice to have great efficacy, but it’s also nice to have very low toxicity. Those will change practice, and I’m hoping that we are going to see FDA approval of those drugs or at least 1 of them in 2022.