Samantha Jaglowski, MD, MPH, Discusses Implications of Tisagenlecleucel for Patients with DLBCL

Samantha Jaglowski, MD, MPH, associate professor at The Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center, discussed the implications of her analysis of the CAR T-cell therapy tisagenlecleucel (Kymriah) in adult patients with relapsed or refractory diffuse large B-cell lymphoma (DLBCL) using the Center for International Blood and Marrow Transplant Research (CIBMTR) database at the 61st American Society of Hematology (ASH) Annual Meeting and Exposition, held Dec. 7-10, in Orlando, Florida. 

Though the data is still young, results from the analysis thus far have indicated that populations older than those originally treated in the clinical trial phase are seeing favorable results. The safety profile also appears to have improved. Additionally, researchers have seen much less grade 3 to 4 cytokine release syndrome (CRS) in the real-world setting, compared to the clinical trial setting, potentially resulting from patients being treated with tocilizumab (Actemra) for rescue of CRS at lower grades than what was recommended by the clinical trial.

Transcription:
The implications are really fairly striking. For one, tisagenlecleucel appears to be as safe in a real world setting as it was in the clinical trial, if not safer. And we’re seeing some interesting signals in terms of efficacy combined with cell dosing, that while not yet statistically significant, could be informative moving forward.

So, I think the really important takeaway from our findings – we’re reporting out at just 4.5 months of amazing follow-up, but we are seeing some interesting signals. I think the really important thing is for physicians treating patients with the cellular therapies in the community, it’s really important to consider submitting this data to the CIBMTR so we can continue to study patients in this broader setting, get more information, and learn more about how these novel therapies can be used.