Dr. Jennifer Brown on Mutations and Targets in CLL

Jennifer Brown, MD, PhD, Director, Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia Center, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Assistant Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School, discusses targeted therapies and mutations in chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL).

Brown says that often when considering targeted therapies, physicians and researchers think to look for a kinase that possesses a mutation that makes it active all the time. Brown provides the examples of EGFR inhibitors that work better in patients with lung cancer who have EGFR mutations or inhibiting BCR-ABL activating mutations in chronic myeloid leukemia.

In CLL, there are no mutations in these tyrosine kinases, but there is chronic activation of the pathway, which could be attributed to the nature of the disease or the surrounding cells in the environment.