VIDEO: Unmet needs of patients with DLBCL

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There still are some very serious unmet needs. I hinted at one subgroup, which is really, I think, underserved in the clinic and frequently underserved in clinical trials as well, which is Richter syndrome. Some people say, "Well, that's not DLBCL." It is DLBCL, it's DLBCL coming from a different place and has yes, worse overall outcomes for most Richter syndrome than other de novo DLBCLs, or probably worse than transformed follicular lymphoma, which is now DLBCL-like as well.

So not enough progress and not enough trials, and again, I think the progress there has been immunotherapy, but it's very small trials so far. What we need to do is to even make extra effort to make patients aware of clinical trials. We only get FDA approvals, we only see how good things are, when we get these patients on trials. Richter is a little less common than other DLBCL subtypes.

So it's a great unmet need and the only way to start to meet that need is to see how good some of these new therapies are. And we have open trials for CAR T cells, for bispecific antibodies, monotherapies, but also in combinations, combination with BTK inhibitors, combinations with some other rational partners, but we have to get patients onto those trials, you know, and really America needs to do better, just in getting patients onto clinical trials to help to solve these unmet needs.

They're kind of solvable. This is not as complex as some big problems in the world. I mean, these are potentially solvable things. Maybe not perfect, but yeah, if we get patients on trials, we will see, 'cause the very early data, some of these immunotherapies for Richter syndrome, pretty effective, so that's promising. And other unmet needs are just, again, back to the high risk groups that we already talked about, double-hit lymphomas, they do better with CAR T cells, but still they don't do great.

And even probably some of the P53 mutated subsets, better with immunotherapies, but still room for improvement. So I think that improvement will just be about some of these rational combinations, bispecific plus chemo, bispecifics plus lenalidomide, and some other ways that we can make them hopefully potentiate each therapy.