Safety & Efficacy of Odronextamab for DLBCL After CAR-T Failure | Matthew Matasar, MD | #ASH24

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 annual ASH to be sharing some very exciting updated data from clinical trials that we have led. One important finding that I'm here to report at ASH is work that we've done looking at the disease called diffuse large B cell lymphoma, which is an aggressive non-ophthalm's lymphoma. We know that even when this has come back after chemotherapy, treatments like CAR T cell therapy can cure some patients. Unfortunately, we know that CAR T therapy does not cure everybody. And we don't yet know as a medical community how best to care for patients when they've been failed by CAR T cell therapy. We did work looking at a type of medicine called a bispecific antibody. This is a newer type of immunotherapy. And the specific one that we studied is a medicine called Odrinextamab, which rolls off the tongue. And we used Odrinextamab as a treatment for patients who had their disease come back after CAR T cell therapy to see if it could help achieve disease control. We found that indeed Odrinextamab can help patients in this very challenging situation. And about half of patients treated with Odrinextamab did respond to that medicine, meaning their disease got smaller. And about a third of patients had their disease go into complete remission. This is very exciting for us as clinicians because we don't have a lot of options that we know are very effective consistently in patients facing this challenge. We learned also that not everybody is equally likely to benefit from Odrinextamab. Patients who've received CAR T cell therapy and had it last for six months or longer before their disease showed again, were very likely to have benefit from Odrinextamab, with over 80% of people having a benefit and maybe even as many as two thirds of the patients going into complete remission. In terms of safety, we know that Odrinextamab can be given safely. Its side effects are pretty well known at this point and very manageable by physicians who are experts at giving this class of medicines. So my hope is that these data from the ELM1 trial really do point a way forward for us in the lymphoma community and how we can better care for patients when they've been failed by CAR T cell therapy.