The Treatment Journey of a Patient with CLL
This article was originally published on Cure
In this episode of the “CURE Talks Cancer” podcast, we spoke with Mark Hoffman, a patient with chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL), about his diagnosis and treatment journey.
Mark Hoffman, 53, a tech salesman in San Diego, started to experience swollen lymph nodes that weren’t going away. He finally sought a specialist who did a lymph node biopsy, determining Mark had CLL.
Mark has a 17p deletion in addition to other high-risk genetic markers. At first, he was under watch and wait for his disease, but his white blood cell count peaked at 90,000 (the normal range is 4,500 to 11,000 per microliter). Luckily, in 2017, Mark began a clinical trial combining Imbruvica (ibrutinib) with Venclexta (venetoclax).