VIDEO: Recent advances, FDA approvals have ‘changed the landscape rapidly’ in DLBCL

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Over the past several years, there have been many, which has really changed the landscape rapidly in the past 4 or 5 years. Obviously, there are CAR T-cell treatments available — now three different FDA-approved products — and two of those are now available as second-line treatment. In addition to cell therapy, there's several new drugs, including polatuzumab vedotin (Polivy, Genentech), which is an anti-CD79b antibody-drug conjugate. This is an active agent by itself and works well in combination with chemoimmunotherapy, and has recently been granted front-line approval in combination with components of R-CHOP.

In addition to polatuzumab vedotin, there's also tafasitamab (Monjuvi; MorphoSys, Incyte), which is used in combination with lenalidomide. This is an anti-CD19 monoclonal antibody that has impressive durable responses in those patients who have complete remission after treatment with that combination. And then there's a couple others. There's also loncastuximab tesirine (Zynlonta, ADC Therapeutics), which is an antibody-drug conjugate, again targeting CD19 — but this is a slightly different chemotherapy conjugated to the monoclonal antibody, and it is given as a single agent every 3 weeks. It's very active and well tolerated for sort of bridging therapy for relapsed to refractory diffused B-cell lymphoma.

And then most recently, as of middle or late May of 2023, we have approval of epcoritamab (Epkinly; Genmab, AbbVie), which is the first bispecific antibody approved for this indication that targets CD20 and engages T cells and elicits an immune effector cell, sort of therapeutic response with high activity and very reasonable rates of complete remission with a safety profile that requires some attention to detail in terms of mitigation of risks of cytokine release syndrome and the potential for some neurotoxicities that we see with other immunotherapies, particularly CAR T-cell treatment. So, that is the most recent addition — epcoritamab — and I think there's a lot of enthusiasm about using that agent in the near future.