Venetoclax + Pola-R-CHP for High-Risk B-Cell Lymphoma | Catherine Diefenbach, MD | #ASH24

Hi, I'm Dr. Catherine Dieffenbach. I'm the Director of Lymphoma and the Translational Director of Research at NYU Langone Health Prometto Cancer Center. I'm actually presenting two papers at ASH this meeting. The first one is a study in frontline diffuse large B-cell lymphoma, which is really interesting because it is really sort of personalized medicine or targeted therapy looking at a very personalized way. So patients who had overexpression of BCL2 with DLBCL were treated with standard of care therapy with a BCL2 inhibitor, vanetoclax, added to that to see if we could target what is a high risk feature in DLBCL by using a personalized approach. And this was a small early phase study, so we looked at both safety and efficacy. I think with the first study what's really interesting particularly is that there's a category of very high risk lymphoma patients called double hit or triple hit lymphoma who are considered to be sort of the highest risk, most adverse features of lymphoma patients. And 100% of patients, it was a small number, but 100% of these patients had a complete response to this therapy, which is really, really exciting and unusual. And of that 100% who had a complete response at one year, four out of the seven were still in a complete remission and only two of the seven had actually relapsed. So we had a 66% one year progression free survival and these tend to be patients that relapse early. So the fact that at a year or beyond a year you still had patients who hadn't relapsed, this is a potentially very promising therapy particularly for patients with BCL2 mutation or BCL2 translocation. I think what these studies highlight is really that if you have lymphoma it is important to at minimum get a second opinion from a lymphoma specialist because lymphoma is so complicated now and we have so many treatment options that can improve outcomes. But even in the community through telehealth and other ways it's important to find out all the treatment options that you have available before making a treatment decision and we're always happy to help.