Conditions: Patients With CLL Relapsing After an Initial Response (CR, PR ≥ 6 Months) Following no More Than Two Prior Treatment Lines; or Patients With CLL Refractory (SD, PD or CR/PR < 6 Months) Following no More Than Two Prior Treatment Lines
Keywords: CLL relapsed refractory Bendamustine Ofatumumab
Allocation: NA | Intervention model: SINGLE_GROUP
Enrollment: 49
Healthy volunteers: no

Brief summary:
In the last ten years there have been significant developments in CLL treatment. The advent of fludarabine, rituximab and the association of chemo-immunotherapy have substantially increased overall response rate, CR rate, time to progression and may also have an impact on overall survival.

Even though, CLL remains incurable and all patients eventually relapse and progressively become resistant to treatment. The development of an effective therapy that is not cross-resistant with the ones currently available as front-line treatment, is one of the clinical unmet needs within CLL.

BendOfa is a non comparative phase II trial designed to determine the therapeutic benefit of bendamustine given together to ofatumumab in relapsed or resistant patients with CLL.

Bendamustine is approved by FDA for CLL treatment, it is an hybrid drug with alkylating agents and purine analogue properties that may lack of cross resistance with fludarabine. It was utilized in CLL as a single agent and its association with rituximab is currently under clinical investigation.

Ofatumumab is a new fully human anti-CD20 monoclonal antibody with high in vitro efficacy on CD20 low-expressing CLL cells. An early report showed that ofatumumab in single therapy is effective in highly pre-treated refractory CLL patients.

Both drugs were generally well tolerated without unexpected untoward toxicity. On the basis of these data, bendamustine and ofatumumab could be a new effective and well tolerated combination for patients with relapsed and refractory CLL.

Detailed description:

Arms:
arm 1: Bendamustine + Ofatumumab

Interventions: intervention 1: Ofatumumab intervention 2: Bendamustine
Intervention descriptions: intervention 1: Ofatumumab will be administered at the dose of 300 mg IV D1 and 1000 mg IV D8 1st course; 1000 mg IV D1, 2nd -6th courses. intervention 2: Bendamustine will be infused at the doses of 70 mg/m2 IV on days D1 and D2 of each course.

Protocol document: