Dr. Goy Compares Acalabrutinib With Ibrutinib in MCL

Andre Goy, MD, chairman and director, chief of Lymphoma, director of Clinical and Translational Cancer Research at John Theurer Cancer Center, provides a comparison of acalabrutinib (Calquence) with ibrutinib (Imbruvica) in mantle cell lymphoma (MCL).

In the treatment of patients with MCL, there is not yet a comparison of ibrutinib with acalabrutinib. However, in chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL), even though acalabrutinib is not yet approved, there was an interesting presentation at the 2017 ASH Annual Meeting , says Goy. In this presentation, a patient who did not tolerate ibrutinib was switched to acalabrutinib, where the response rate was 67% to 70%. Goy says that this patient did not progress on ibrutinib, but could not tolerate it.

Acalabrutinib was approved by the FDA in October 2017 following the results from the phase III ACE-LY-004 trial. The objective response rate (ORR) was 81% with acalabrutinib (95% CI, 73%-87%). The complete response rate with acalabrutinib was 40% and the partial response rate was 41%. The most common adverse events (AEs) of any grade were anemia (46%), thrombocytopenia (44%), headache (39%), neutropenia (36%), diarrhea (31%), fatigue (28%), myalgia (21%), and bruising (21%). The most common grade ≥3 AEs were neutropenia (15%), thrombocytopenia (12%), anemia (10%), and diarrhea (3.2%).