Clive James’s treatment

The Australian writer and broadcaster, Clive James, who passed away at his home in Cambridge last Sunday, was first diagnosed with chronic lymphocytic leukaemia (CLL) in 2010. Two years later, James joked that he was “highly embarrassed” to still be alive. The reason, he said, was a then little-known drug called ibrutinib. An experimental treatment, ibrutinib inhibits a particular communication pathway in cancerous cells, holding back the disease, without the side-effects of more toxic treatments. James even dedicated a poem to it in his 2017 anthology Injury Time, referring to it as a “little cluster-bomb of goodness”. Although not without its side-effects, ibrutinib is now used to treat other types of blood cancer, alongside CLL. Its success rate is well documented, but while ibrutinib is now available on the NHS, it is only offered in the UK as a second-line treatment unless a particular genetic mutation is present that prevents chemo from working. In Europe, it is offered as a first-line treatment on diagnosis.