In their phase-2 study of tisagenlecleucel (marketed as KYMRIAH®), published on-line Dec. 1, 2018 in the New England Journal of Medicine, an international team of researchers evaluated 93 patients with relapsed or refractory diffuse large B-cell lymphoma (DLBCL). They found that 52% of those patients responded favorably to the therapy. Forty percent had a complete response and 12% had a partial response.
Sixty-five percent of those patients—recruited from 27 sites in North America, Europe, Australia and Asia—were relapse free one year later, including 79% of the complete responders. The median progression-free survival for patients in this trial, known as JULIET; NCT02445248, “has not been reached,” the authors note.
This compares favorably with earlier studies based on chemotherapy. The retrospective SCHOLAR-1 study, published in 2017, found that only 7% of patients with refractory DLBCL had a complete response. The median overall survival was a mere 6.2 months. “Outcomes were consistently poor across patient subgroups and study cohorts,” the SCHOLAR-1 authors noted.
Originally published in The Forefront