Dr. Christian Gisselbrecht on Outcomes of Relapsed DLBCL

Christian Gisselbrecht, MD, a Professor of Haematology in the Haemato-Oncology Department of Hôpital Saint-Louis, at Diderot University, Paris, discusses refractory disease in aggressive diffuse large b-cell lymphoma (DLBCL).

Gisselbrecht and his team investigated relapsed/refractory patients with DLBCL from two studies. The first study looked at rituximab relapse following the PALOMA-1 study.

One interesting finding was that patients who relapsed on rituximab could be salvaged with chemotherapy followed by autologous stem-cell treatment (ASCT), said Gisselbrecht. The response rate after ASCT was 40%.

However only half of patients could be submitted for ASCT. If a patient wasn’t chemo-sensitive, they could not go for ASCT, said Gisselbrecht. If patients relapsed after ASCT, they typically had a very poor outcome, he added.