EHA 2021 | HOVON/LLPC Transplant BRaVE: novel salvage chemotherapy for R/R Hodgkin lymphoma

So, we treated patients with relapsed or refractory Hodgkin lymphoma with a combination of brentuximab vedotin, which is a CD30 antibody-drug conjugate in combination with DHAP chemotherapy, followed by autologous stem cell transplants. We treated 67 patients in this trial and at EHA presented a poster with the long-term follow-up results.

Progression-free survival in this cohort after three years is 76% and the overall survival was 95%. So, the outcome was pretty good in this cohort compared to a standard salvage chemotherapy. And besides the follow-up analysis, we also showed some biomarker analysis. So, for example, we measured the serum TARC, which is a chemokine secreted by Hodgkin Reed-Sternberg cells. You can measure that in the serum of patients, and we measured it at baseline during therapy and all through follow-up. We saw a significant decrease in serum TARC and patients who were responding very well had a faster decrease than patients who did not respond. And also, the serum TARC level after one cycle of BV-DHAP was highly prognostic for progression-free survival.

So actually, you can use the serum TARC as a very early response marker, already one cycle of treatments, and it’s very easy to measure, so you can do this, do that next to the PET/CT scan. So, that can probably guide a risk stratified treatment better than we do now. And besides that, we also measured TARC in the biopsies of the patients, which most patients were positive for the TARC staining in their HRS cells, but a few patients showed negative or weak staining of TARC, and that appeared to be a poor prognostic factor for outcome.

And we also measured the interim PET scan analysis for the interim PET response in which you see that patients with a metabolic complete response had a very good outcome compared to patients with a partial response, and this also correlated with the serum TARC levels.