ICML 2023 | Promising agents emerging for Richter’s transformation
Chan Yoon Cheah, MBBS, Linear Clinical Research and Sir Charles Gairdner Hospital, Perth, Australia, discusses promising therapeutic strategies for Richter’s transformation (RT), which is usually treated with R-CHOP chemotherapy and is associated with suboptimal response rates. Dr Cheah highlights the promise of novel agents being explored in this field, such as pirtobrutinib and epcoritamab. This interview took place at the 17th International Conference on Malignant Lymphoma (ICML), held in Lugano, Switzerland.
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Transcript (edited for clarity)
So Richter’s is a really interesting but difficult disease to treat. And traditionally we’ve given patients chemotherapy with R-CHOP and the results have been largely suboptimal. But quite a few new agents have become available recently or have become explored in Phase II studies. At ASH last year, we saw data on pirtobrutinib, which is a reversible covalent BTK inhibitor showing encouraging activity with a favorable side effect profile in Richter’s transformation...
So Richter’s is a really interesting but difficult disease to treat. And traditionally we’ve given patients chemotherapy with R-CHOP and the results have been largely suboptimal. But quite a few new agents have become available recently or have become explored in Phase II studies. At ASH last year, we saw data on pirtobrutinib, which is a reversible covalent BTK inhibitor showing encouraging activity with a favorable side effect profile in Richter’s transformation. The response, the PFS may be not as much as we would like, but I think the fact that we’re seeing such good responses for an agent which is so well tolerated and once daily oral is really encouraging. The other area which is being explored is bispecific antibodies and we saw some data for epcor and Richter’s presented at ASH as well with a CR rate of 50% in albeit about ten patients treated. So although Richter’s is hard to treat, I think we are starting to see more novel active agents and hopefully we’ll start to see novel combinations exploring ways to treat people with this fairly difficult disease.
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