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AbbVie's Imbruvica succeeds in phase 3 blood cancer study

AbbVie Inc. said its medicine Imbruvica met the main goal of a phase 3 study evaluating the drug in adults with chronic lymphocytic leukemia, a type of blood cancer.

Results from the Illuminate trial showed that Imbruvica was better than chemotherapy medicine chlorambucil in increasing the length of time that a patient with previously untreated chronic lymphocytic leukemia or small lymphocytic lymphoma lived without the disease worsening.

Patients in the trial either received AbbVie's medicine or chemotherapy in combination with Roche Holding AG's Gazyva.

AbbVie said the results pave the way for the first potential chemotherapy-free CD20 combo in the first-line treatment of that form of blood cancer.

Johnson & Johnson unit Janssen Biotech Inc. commercializes Imbruvica with AbbVie. The U.S. FDA has previously approved the treatment in six disease indications.

Chronic lymphocytic leukemia is the most common form of leukemia in adults and is a type of cancer that can develop from cells in the bone marrow that later mature into certain white blood cells. The prevalence of the disease is about 115,000 patients in the U.S., with about 19,000 newly diagnosed patients every year.

Small lymphocytic lymphoma is a slow-growing lymphoma biologically similar to chronic lymphocytic leukemia in which too many immature white blood cells cause lymph nodes to become larger than normal.