glivec

Hi Bob

Basically, for patients in chronic phase, who respond to Glivec and are not intolerant to it (i.e. do not experience an intolerable level of side-effects) the progression rate is very low.

The results for  5 year follow up  to the Gilvec (Imatinib)  trial  in 2006 showed that (to quote from the published results)

'estimated overall survival of patients who received imatinib as initial therapy was 89% at 60 months'

and

'Remarkably, no patient who had a complete cytogenetic response and a reduction in levels of BCR-ABL transcripts of at least 3 log at 12 or 18 months after starting imatinib had progression of CML by 60 months. Only 2% of patients who had a complete cytogenetic response and a reduction in levels of BCR-ABL transcripts of less than 3 log at 18 months had progressed to the accelerated phase or blast crisis at 60 months.'

The scientific paper that these results were published in  is available online at the link below.

http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/full/355/23/2408

As someone who has chronic phase CML and has been luck enough to respond to Glivec and get a 3 log reduction I don't worry too much about disease progression.  It also appears form the results that the longer you are responding to Glivec the lower the chances of disease progression (i.e chances are lower in  4th year than 3rd year, 5th year than 4th year etc.)

Of course for those that don't respond to Glivec there are now other treatment options such as Dasatinib and Nilotinib although there is currently a battle going on to try and make NICE support funding of these in the UK as you may have seen from many other posts in this forum.

I hope this tells you what you need to know, I don't think an 'average time to support non-progression' would mean much for Glivec as it depends on individual response.

All the best

Peter