Dr. Andreadis on the Treatment of Relapsed DLBCL

Charalambos (Babis) Andreadis, MD, MSCE, associate professor of clinical medicine, Department of Medicine, University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center, discusses the treatment of patients with relapsed diffuse large B-cell lymphoma (DLBCL).

The relapsed setting of DLBCL is an area of clinical unmet need. One-third of patients in this setting can benefit, or even be cured, by transplant, but additional therapies are needed, Andreadis says. There are many patients who are ineligible for transplant or do not respond well enough to chemotherapy to benefit. Chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapy may be an option for these patients.

Results from the phase II JULIET study presented at the 2018 ASH Annual Meeting showed that the CAR T-cell therapy tisagenlecleucel (Kymriah) continued to demonstrate durable objective response rates (ORR) with a median of 19 months of follow-up for patients with relapsed or refractory DLBCL. The ORR in this updated analysis was 54% (95% CI, 41%-62%) with the CD19-targeted CAR T-cell therapy.