Evolving Therapies in R/R DLBCL: Concluding Remarks

Ian W. Flinn, MD, PhD: Thank you to all of you. This has been a rich and informative discussion. Before we conclude, I’d like to get final thoughts from each of you. John, let’s start with you.

John M. Burke, MD: This is a really exciting time. There’s been an unprecedented opportunity to have access to novel therapies in the relapsed setting—CAR [chimeric antigen receptor] T cell, tafasitamab-lenalidomide, selinexor. Most of us have been through a couple of decades without access to any new therapies in this space. It’s a challenge for oncologists around the world to learn how to use these drugs. It’s tough to get experience with all of these. But staying on top of all the data and being able to use these drugs effectively is important when treating patients with large B-cell lymphoma. There is a lot of hope now in this disease. 

Amitkumar Mehta, MD: I second that thought from John. There’s a lot of excitement, a lot of novel agents. We just touched on bispecifics. There are many others in the pipeline, including novel targets like TAK-981. There are many other agents rolling out. I hope that in next several years, as Kami mentioned, we will be able to find out which patients will benefit from the treatment—a more personalized approach. Large B-cell lymphoma is a heterogeneous disease. We will probably have to define those characteristics of poor prognostic markers or responses to the treatment based on the patient characteristics or disease characteristics.

A lot of work needs to be done. Also, there are a lot of learning curves. Managing adverse effects of a treatment is the best way to actually get the most out of a treatment. If you don’t handle the adverse effect well, the treatment will fail. A humongous task going forward will be educating the community. But there is a lot of opportunity as well as excitement. I hope that down the line the outcomes of patients with large B-cell lymphoma will get better and better.

Ian W. Flinn, MD, PhD: Kami, any concluding remarks?

Kami J. Maddocks, MD: As I mentioned, this is an exciting time. We’ve made remarkable progress, and there are a lot of promising agents out there. As we move forward and focus on efficacious agents, it’s also important that we look at safety, access, and cost of these agents. These are barriers that we face, even with the effective therapies that we have.

Ian W. Flinn, MD, PhD: That’s definitely important. Loretta, I’ll give you the last word.

Loretta J. Nastoupil, MD: One thing that I can take away from 2020 is that science can really solve some major problems. When you remove the red tape, you can get things done very efficiently. One thing we’ve learned in the last year is that by leveraging real-world data, you can address some really critical questions and even utilize some of that data to influence some of the decisions made by the FDA. This provides us some opportunity, moving forward, to be more creative with how we conduct trials so we can get answers quicker and potentially shape the treatment landscape more efficiently.

Ian W. Flinn, MD, PhD: Important words. Thank you. To our viewing audience, we hope you found this OncLive® Peer Exchange® discussion to be useful and informative.

Transcript Edited for Clarity