Earlier this month, Janssen/Pharmacyclics announced they had submitted a New Drug Application (NDA) for Food & Drug Administration (FDA) approval of ibrutinib, an oral Bruton’s tyrosine kinase inhibitor (BTK) in chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) for the treatment of patients with a deletion of the short arm of chromosome 17 (del17p). Here’s a link to July 10 press release.

The company have requested Priority review; approval later this year or in early 2014 is highly likely given that the agent has also been designated a Breakthrough Therapy by the FDA.

This is great news for CLL patients!

CLL is an incurable disease. It is the most common leukemia in the United States with 15,500 new diagnoses a year.

Chromosomal abnormalities are fairly common in CLL and predict both time to first treatment and overall survival i.e. how long someone will live. Sadly, those with a 17p deletion have the worst outcome and a poor prognosis.

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