VIDEO: New treatment options for DLBCL

Editor’s note: This is a previously posted video, and the below is an automatically generated transcript to be used for informational purposes. Please notify editor@healio.com if there are concerns regarding accuracy of the transcription.

Well, diffuse large B-cell lymphoma, DLBCL, is the highest-incidence lymphoma in the world, 25,000 new cases each year in the US, and in some sense, we're very lucky because we cure the slight majority of patients with standard therapy, standard therapy still probably being R-CHOP, R-C-H-O-P, for the past 20 years. And we cure, I say, a slight majority, maybe 60%, maybe a bit more. Again, it's good news compared to pancreas cancer, I suppose, but, you know, as you can hear, it still leaves about 40% of patients with great unmet need. So we are lucky to have had some real advances even in the recent past, and just over the past year, perhaps the first great success in changing frontline therapy, not yet in FDA approval, but the POLARIX trial, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, showing that incorporating this antibody drug conjugate, polatuzumab vedotin, targeting CD79 with frontline therapy, as we call it, Pola-R-CHP instead of R-CHOP. And the POLARIX trial actually showed, for me, a somewhat surprising benefit. It was the better result than I even predicted. There was about a 6% improvement in near-term progression-free survival, so that's a real benefit to patients. It wasn't for nothing.

There was a little bit more toxicity of also about a 6% increase in febrile neutropenia, one of the main toxicities we always worry about with combination chemotherapies. So it is likely that that combination therapy will get FDA approved in the near term, but I don't think that it's to say that that would be the therapy for everybody. I just think it's just another choice. If it one day were to possibly show an overall survival benefit for all patients, then maybe they will say, "This is the standard of care," but I think still, the standard of care will be R-CHOP, and for some patients with higher-risk DLBCL, frontline patients with double-expressor lymphoma, high expression of MYC and BCL2 or some other high-risk factors, even poor IPI's, perhaps Pola-R-CHIP would be the right therapy for those patients. So lucky to be doing pretty well. Lucky to have made some recent improvements even in the frontline, but still a lot of unmet need and therefore especially lucky that we have things in the pipeline that are going to get FDA approved for later lines but also getting tested even now in frontline combination therapies.