Transcript
Dr Evens: One more in terms of frontline therapy that we'll talk about here. It was an oral presentation by a fellow actually at Northwestern. It was abstract number 351 yesterday, entitled, "A Phase 1/2 trial of Brentuximab Vedotin Plus Rituximab As Frontline Therapy for Patients with Immunosuppression-Associated CD30 and/or EBV- positive Lymphoma."
It was mainly PTLDs from solid organ transplant, but they did allow some other immunosuppression patients in there. Maybe just talk a little bit about this patient population in general. I know you guys do a decent amount, Dr Vose, of solid organ transplants. Every patient is at risk of lymphoma, maybe how you think of those patient population and a little bit about the study.
Dr Vose: Definitely patients that have had, kidney transplant, valve transplants, heart transplants, etc., are at increased risk for that, as well as patients who had bone marrow transplants. Basically, some of those patients as well.
They fit into 2 different categories. One category is monomorphic and fairly easy to treat with rituximab alone. There are some patients that don't respond to rituximab or really have more difficult to treat PTLD. This trial was interesting, in that it combined the 2 different agents together.
What wasn't clear to me was if the patients, which category they fit into. If they were the easy-to-treat patients, do they really need their brentuximab or they were in the more difficult category? I think the interesting part, definitely they had a high response rate. Again, some neuropathy for toxicity.
I think as far as the difficult-to-treat patient population, that would be a low-toxicity regimen certainly compared to chemotherapy with rituximab alone. I think the results were promising, especially in that difficult-to-treat population.
Dr Evens: Great. Dr Ansell, how do you approach it? Any quick comments on this?
Dr Ansell: I think that it was very interesting because most of us give rituximab alone. This really gives you one more tool that you like to use that focused on CD30-positive disease. There is some interesting data about CD30-positive Treg cells being relevant.
One of the things that's going to be curious with follow-up is whether you modulate the immune environment, as well as actually targeting
