VIDEO: Blinatumomab has potential to become ‘new standard of care’ as post-reinduction therapy for pediatric B-ALL
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ORLANDO — In this video, Ryan D. Cassaday, MD, attending physician at the Seattle Cancer Care Alliance, associate professor of medicine at the University of Washington School of Medicine, and assistant member of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, discusses a late-breaking abstract presented at the ASH Annual Meeting and Exposition that showed blinatumomab was superior to chemotherapy as a post-reinduction therapy before hematopoietic stem cell transplantation in children and young adults with relapsed and refractory B-acute lymphoblastic leukemia.
Blinatumomab (Blincyto, Amgen) was associated with fewer toxicities, improvements in DFS and OS, higher rates of minimal residual disease (MRD) negativity, and a greater likelihood of proceeding to HSCT. In light of these promising results, the trial’s data safety and monitoring committee stopped the study early because it “would have been potentially unethical” to continue randomization since “the results were so good in the blinatumomab arm,” Cassaday said.
“This certainly adds to our experience of using blinatumomab for chemo-refractory MRD, particularly in a younger patient population where we don’t have as much experience yet,” he told Healio. “[The study] also sets the stage to make this the new standard of care for patients with relapsed/refractory B-cell ALL who have received induction therapy for relapsed disease to hopefully derive deeper remissions for them to go on to receive stem cell transplantation.”
Reference:
Brown PA, et al. Abstract LBA-1. Presented at: ASH Annual Meeting and Exposition; Dec. 7-10, 2019; Orlando.
Disclosure: Cassaday reports receiving research funding from Amgen, Incyte, Kite Pharma, Pfizer, Merck, Seattle Genetics and Vanda Pharmaceuticals, and being a consultant for Adaptive Biotechnologies, Amgen, Jazz Pharmaceuticals and Pfizer.