Understanding cancer cell survival is key to patient survival

The outlook for individual patients with chronic lymphocytic leukaemia (CLL) has always been difficult to predict. This situation has led to the development of a plethora of prognostic markers, but nearly all studies have shown that 17p deletion consistently confers the worst outcome of all subtypes of CLL, with typical survival of 2–3 years as a result of low proportions of patients responding to primary chemo-immunotherapy and short progression-free survival. This cytogenetic lesion is quite rare in newly diagnosed patients (occurring in in 5–10% of such cases) but is much more prevalent in the relapsed and refractory setting (in up to 50% of patients).1