ASH 2023 | Loncastuximab tesirine as a consolidation strategy post-CAR T-cell therapy in DLBCL

This is also a trial-in-progress abstract that we are presenting this year at ASH. We know that about 30% of patients with large B-cell lymphoma who receive standard-of-care autologous anti-CD19 CAR-T, 30 days after CAR T-cell infusion on PET scan will show a partial response. Patients who do have a partial response three days after CAR T-cell infusion, in 70% of cases will unfortunately relapse or progress. And we know that most of patients who relapse after CAR-T, unfortunately, will die of disease progression. So it’s truly important to be able to provide a consolidation approach for patients who have a PR and increase the chance of conversion to spontaneous, complete response from 30% to higher rates. Loncastuximab is an antibody-drug conjugate targeting CD19, which is the same target as standard-of-care CAR T-cell treatments. We don’t have a lot of biological information on the expression of CD19 on day 30, but the expectation is that it should still be high and potentially induce further eradication of lymphoma cells and favour conversion of PRs to CRs. Our goal is to increase the chance from 30% to 50% or higher. We have already rolled the first eight patients, when we get to ten patients overall, we will perform our futility analysis for toxicity and efficacy, and hopefully we’ll be able to disclose some clinical data at the next meeting about this clinical trial.