I often joke that my job here at CIRM is to be the official translator for the stem cell agency. I have to translate complex science into everyday English that people without a science background – that includes me – can understand.

Think I’m joking? Try making sense of this.

See what I mean. If you are a scientist this is not only perfectly clear, it’s also quite exciting. But for the rest of us……..

Actually, it is really quite exciting news. It’s about a CIRM-funded clinical trial being run by Oncternal Therapeutics to treat people with chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL), a kind of cancer where our body makes too many white blood cells. The study is using a combination therapy of Cirmtuzumab (a monoclonal antibody named after us because we helped fund its development) and ibrutinib, a conventional therapy used to treat cancers like CLL.

Cirmtuzumab recognizes and then attaches itself to a protein on the surface of cancer stem cells that the cancer needs to survive and spread. This attachment disables the protein (called ROR1) which slows the growth of the leukemia and makes it more vulnerable to anti-cancer drugs like ibrutinib.

In this Phase 1/2 clinical trial 12 patients were given the combination therapy for 24 weeks or more, making them eligible to determine how effective, or ineffective, the therapy is:

• 11 of the 12 patients had either a partial response – meaning a reduction in the amount of detectable cancer – or a complete response to the treatment – meaning no detectable cancer.
• None of the patients saw their cancer spread or grow
• Three of the patients completed a year of treatment and they all showed signs of a complete response including no enlarged lymph nodes and white blood cell counts in the normal range.  

The combination therapy is also being used to treat people with Mantle Cell Lymphoma (MCL), a rare but fast-growing form of blood cancer. The results from this group, while preliminary, are also encouraging. One patient, who had experienced a relapse following a bone marrow transplant, experienced a complete response after three months of cirmtuzumab and ibrutinib.  

The data on the clinical trial was presented at a poster session (that’s the poster at the top of this blog) at the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology.

In a news release Dr. James Breitmeyer, the President & CEO of Oncternal, said the results are very encouraging:  

“These data presented today, taken together with an earlier Phase 1 study of cirmtuzumab as a monotherapy in relapsed/refractory CLL, give us increased confidence in the potential for cirmtuzumab as a treatment for patients with ROR1-expressing lymphoid malignancies, particularly in combination with ibrutinib as a potential treatment for patients with CLL and MCL. We believe that the data also help to validate the importance of ROR1 as a therapeutic target,”