Hi, I'm Dr. Catherine Dieffenbach. I'm the Director of Lymphoma and the Translational Director of Research at NYU Langone Health Prometer Cancer Center. The other study was actually for patients with relapsed diffuse large B-cell lymphoma. And in that study, we're really looking to see if we can improve outcomes and improve cure. But this was, again, an early phase study. So what we wanted to see is if we could take standard chemotherapy, which in this case is ifosamide, carboplatinine, and toposide, or ice chemotherapy, which generally has a complete response rate of about 34%, which means only 34% of patients are really fit to go for transplant. And for CAR T, we know that patients with minimal disease do better than patients with a lot of disease. So patients who need to be debulked for CAR T are not often also adequately debulked with chemotherapy. When we added a bispecific antibody, clofidimab, that is approved as a single agent for relapsed large cell lymphoma to the ICE platform for second-line relapses to see if adding immunotherapy, namely a bispecific antibody, to standard chemotherapy could improve the efficacy of both. We're very excited. Actually, this is very early data. So we do not have long-term follow-up data yet. But what we showed is that across the board for all categories of risk, so for patients who had early relapse, who had late relapse, and even for patients who had primary refractory disease, we had complete response rates that were over 60% and overall response rates that were over 70%. So this is really promising data, particularly when you think about the fact that patients who have primary refractory disease are not considered to have chemotherapy-sensitive disease. This is an enormously increased number of patients that are now able to go to auto-transplant or CAR-T. And so we're very excited, actually, to be able to hopefully present the follow-up data in a later meeting and see where this study leads. The overall response rate to chemo is about 34%. To the bispecific antibodies, it's around 50-something percent. We went to an overall response rate of over 70%. So monoclonal antibodies are one antibody that targets a protein that's on the tumor cell that's not usually on normal cells and uses that targeting by the antibody to label those cells for elimination. So that's how a single antibody works. A double antibody is an antibody with two arms. And what those two arms do, one arm grabs a tumor cell and one arm grabs a cell of your immune system called a T cell. And it says, here, T cell is a tumor cell. Eat this and tell your friends. And then basically what it does is it gives a supercharged boost to the immune system to allow the T cells to recognize tumor antigen and then go and target it and hopefully eliminate it. And when you have chemotherapy around that is targeting a lot of chemotherapy and killing it, it allows the immune system to go after the rest.
HealthTree • December 23, 2024