ICML 2023 | Acalabrutinib and rituximab as first-line therapy for older patients with MCL

This is a very interesting single arm Phase II clinical trial, which we conducted for the frontline patients in elderly mantle cell lymphoma. And this is a very important study because I believe that the median age of mantle cell lymphoma is 71 years. And many of these patients are aged above 65. And we want to develop newer therapies for these group of patients where these patients can get away from chemotherapy and get into remission as soon as possible with minimal side effects. In order to do that, we have designed chemotherapy free targeted agents such as ibrutinib and also now second generation BTK inhibitor, which is acalabrutinib. A combination of the two was hypothesized that it would induce good remissions. And that is what we see in this study where we enrolled 50 patients who were previously untreated aged 65 years and above with the good cardiac status. And those patients have achieved a very good remission rate of 92%. And many of these patients achieved complete response within first three to four months of treatment. And that was a very huge achievement, because compared to the previous data on ibrutinib and rituximab, where these patients had good response, but there were side effects profile from ibrutinib. And of course, these two are again, major advances compared to chemotherapy alone with bendamustine and rituximab. So in all, I believe that this is a new therapy needed for elderly patients with mantle cell lymphoma with minimal toxicity, without using chemotherapy, without… or without hospital admission. So I think it’s a major advance in the treatment.