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ASH 2025 | The RT1 trial of tislelizumab plus zanubrutinib for the treatment of Richter’s transformation
Barbara Eichhorst, MD, University Hospital Cologne, Cologne, Germany, discusses the results of the Phase II RT1 trial (NCT04271956), which evaluated the combination of tislelizumab and zanubrutinib for the treatment of Richter’s transformation. Dr Eichhorst highlights that the median overall survival has not yet been reached after two years, and that gene expression profiles may help identify patients who benefit from checkpoint inhibitor treatment. This interview took place at the 67th ASH Annual Meeting and Exposition, held in Orlando, FL.
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Transcript
In the RT1 trial, we evaluated the combination of the checkpoint inhibitor tislelizumab with zanubrutinib as a continuous treatment and reported already that 60% of the patients responded and that the median PFS is 10 months. But now we have 25 months median observation time and interestingly what we see is that it seems there’s a kind of a plateau and of course it’s too short to say if there’s really a plateau and also patients are on continuous treatment but it seems that one third of the patients has really long-term benefit with respect to continuous response and also the median overall survival has not yet been reached after two years, which I think is extremely good news for patients...
In the RT1 trial, we evaluated the combination of the checkpoint inhibitor tislelizumab with zanubrutinib as a continuous treatment and reported already that 60% of the patients responded and that the median PFS is 10 months. But now we have 25 months median observation time and interestingly what we see is that it seems there’s a kind of a plateau and of course it’s too short to say if there’s really a plateau and also patients are on continuous treatment but it seems that one third of the patients has really long-term benefit with respect to continuous response and also the median overall survival has not yet been reached after two years, which I think is extremely good news for patients. What we also show here is that we try to identify which patients benefit from checkpoint inhibitor treatment and here it seems that in gene expression profile, particularly really for genes coding for inflammatory signals, that these patients also had a better response than patients lacking that. And also interestingly what we do not see is that PD-1 or PD-L1 expression is not correlating at all with response later on and therefore we cannot just test for PD-1 or PD-L1 expression in order to predict response to this treatment regimen.
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