Three Studies Presented at the American Society of Hematology Annual Meeting Showed Response to Treatment with Campath(R) in Patients with Hig...( Data Showed Campath May Lead to Overa...),Health

Data Showed Campath May Lead to Overall Survival in Patients with Poor Prognostic Factors

SAN FRANCISCO, Dec. 9 /PRNewswire/ -- Bayer HealthCare Pharmaceuticals Inc. today announced results from three studies showing that treatment with Campath(R) (alemtuzumab) showed activity in high-risk chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) patients who have poor prognostic indicators. These findings were presented at the 50th Annual Meeting of the American Society of Hematology in San Francisco, California.

Treatment for CLL can be complicated by genetic risk factors. In some cases of CLL, at least one of the 23 pairs of chromosomes in a cell is found to be either deleted or part of it is lost. One deletion that is occasionally seen in CLL patients is the loss of the short arm of chromosome 17 (17p deletion), which may indicate a poor prognosis including significantly inferior survival compared to other CLL patients. Past studies have shown that treatment naive CLL patients were less likely to have 17p deletions than previously treated patients with CLL, indicating that cytogenetic abnormalities may be acquired during the course of treatment. Effective CLL therapies for patients with 17p deletion are limited.

In one analysis of high-risk patients (abstract #3164), authors used the largest database available on the efficacy of Campath monotherapy to conduct a retrospective analysis of Campath treatment in 138 patients with advanced CLL, stratified according to cytogenetics. Of these patients, 33 percent had the 17p deleted cytogenetic abnormality. Campath administration was found to provide an overall response rate [ORR; complete response rate (CRR) + partial response rate (PRR)] of 38 percent in the total cohort, and an ORR of 44 percent in patients with 17p deletion. Additionally, in patients with 17p deletion, treatment with Campath resulted in progression free survival (PFS) and overall survival (OS) of 7.1 month
'/>"/>