Epcoritamab's Impact on Treating Relapsed Follicular Lymphoma | Umberto Vitolo, MD | EHA 2024

Hello, I am Dr. Umberto Viteron. I'm an hematologist working at the Candiola Cancer Institute in Torino, Italy. And I would like to share with you the data that we presented this meeting or Saturday afternoon and the data regards the treatment of the patient with follicular lymphoma once they have relapsed in a second on further life of treatment. The data that I will present you the treatment of this patient with apkarythma. Apkarythma is a specific antibody and I will try to explain to you in a few words how it works because when you have lymphoma or you have a tumor it means that your immune system doesn't work anymore. And these specific antibodies are antibodies that link to the lymphoma cell, to the tumor from one side, from the other side it links to your normal immune system, your normal T cells and is able to restore the activity of the T cells against the lymphoma. In this study more than 100 patients, 128 patients have been enrolled in patients with follicular lymphoma that are an indolent lymphoma but with the characteristic to relapse many times. The patient was treated with apkarythma, an antibody without any type of chemo. Apkarythma is given simultaneously every week for the first three months and then every other week from cycle 3 to cycle 10 and then every month. So the patient had a very good response because the vast majority of the patients responded to this treatment, more than 80% of the patients responded. Most of them had a complete response that means the disappearance of lymphoma, measures that are assessed by the PADCT and also some other sophisticated techniques like a technique that is called minimally ill disease that means to detect in the lab from the blood of the patient some signs, if there is some signs of lymphoma. 67% of the patients treated with this antibodies do not have any more any signs of lymphoma in the blood and the lymph nodes. With the observation time that now exceeded one year and a half, the majority of the patients who achieved the response continue to have the response. Of course, for any drug there is some side effects but this drug is very well tolerated because the most frequent side effects is so-called syndrome, inflammatory syndrome like a big flu that the patient may have when they receive the first full dose of apkarythma that means fever that could be treated with synchrosanthi bariatric sequence. In order to ameliorate and to improve these side effects we changed the schedule of this administration adding few doses at the lower doses before the patient received the first full dose and also adding in the first weeks some steroids and these measures were effective to reduce the incidence of side effects like fever and so the patient can tolerate this treatment very well so I believe that this is a really promising treatment for a polycoeliform patient without any type of chemo, only with immunotherapy and this antibody is already tested in other studies in combination with other types of drugs with immunomodulated agents for instance and in combination it works very well again and maybe it was even better in combination with other drugs like lenalidomide so I believe that the future for patients with polycoeliform who had relapsed after standard chemotherapy is a good future, is a brilliant future because we have a lot of opportunities and specific antibodies have presented a chemo free approach with a high chance to remove the disease for the patient. Thank you so much for your attention.