SOHO 2025 | The transformative effect of immunotherapies on the treatment landscape of DLBCL

Well, we’ve had FDA-approved CD19 CAR-T for aggressive DLBCL for many years now, since late 2017, and now you know three products, three CAR-T products as well. So we really have a very nice long follow-up for this very novel therapy to really see that for a good percent of these patients they have very durable remission more than five years out and so these are patients that are really you can confidently say they’re likely cured from their lymphoma. So that that’s very exciting. We also have you know a randomized control study in the second-line setting where with continued longer follow-up we’ll understand the risk for things like secondary malignancy and longer-term toxicities or survivorship issues, so that we can really optimize how we’re delivering these therapies and managing patients. So I think there’s a lot of value for this as a one-time treatment that could be really offering cure for patients with this very deadly disease. 

Of course, this is a very exciting space. So we do have a lot of other very transformative therapies as well. So things like bispecific antibodies that are now approved in a later line setting as single agent and also being studied and approved elsewhere based on randomized control study as well in combination with chemotherapies. And then there are trials using them in combination with antibody-drug conjugates and so on. 

And so I think it’ll be important to really see with all these great tools we have, what are the treatment logistics, what are the side effects profiles. And so patients may have more than one option, and the right option may take into account not only the efficacy and the side effects, but the logistics and how that fits into that person’s entire work-life balance. So I think that’s very exciting that they have more options. And so it may not be that CAR-T is the only choice for our patients. But I do think CAR-T will remain a very exciting option, especially also with some of the new technologies that are in clinical trial testing, like the more rapidly manufactured CAR-T, so patients can get to treatment sooner, but also potentially with a more potent CAR-T cells because of the reduced manufacturing time and some things with in vivo CAR-T starting to happen. So we’re starting to blur the lines between how cell therapies are made and given and how drugs are given to patients.

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