Hi, I'm Dr. Matt Matasar. I'm the Chief of Blood Disorders at the Rutgers Cancer Institute in partnership with RWJ Barnabas Health. And I'm here at the 66th ASH to share some important findings that I had the opportunity to hear. I was chairing a session looking at new approaches to caring for patients with a new diagnosis of aggressive B-cell lymphomas. There's standard of care treatments that do cure many patients with aggressive non-hagiculoma like diffuse large B-cell lymphoma. But unfortunately, even our best current treatments do not cure everybody and we need to do better. At the session that I chaired, we heard six presentations from esteemed colleagues around the world sharing their approaches to trying to move the field forward. And the data were very exciting. There were two presentations using a class of medicine called bispecific antibodies. This is a new type of immunotherapy that can be effective in treating both aggressive and slow-growing lymphomas and combining these medicines with a traditional chemotherapy program. One such presentation using a medicine called epkarytomab and one using a similar medicine called glofetomab, they sound alike. And each of these suggested that this approach could indeed be promising. The other presentations focused on non-immunotherapeutic or alternative strategies using various targeted molecules. And each of these is a little bit different and none of these are ready for prime time, but collectively they really do give us a lot of excitement and hope. We're seeing very innovative science being conducted globally to try to improve our outcomes for patients diagnosed with aggressive B-cell lymphoma. And the session really does give us a lot of enthusiasm that we're moving in the right direction.
HealthTree • December 23, 2024