EBMT 2018 | Current landscape and future prospects for Hodgkin lymphoma treatment

Right now, there are still two standards of care for first-line treatment of Hodgkin lymphoma. That’s ABVD and BEACOPP escalated, so the two competing European regiments which are being used all over the world, and that’s in my hands a choice which is not only made by me but also by the patient based on individual risk profiles and preferences and which toxicities are important for you, for example the fertility, which is reduced or destroyed by BEACOPP escalated might be an issue to some patients and not to others. So that’s a really a patient-centered approach.

Then the novel agents, which are the ones you’re asking about, they are not really accessible yet outside of clinical studies so I don’t have to make that choice yet, but hopefully and probably very soon we are going to get approval for one or more of the novel agents in first-line. And we’ll have to wait and see what the clinical landscape will look like. Hopefully we will have the option of including patients in more clinical studies to come because certainly there are a few answers that have been given by the studies already performed and the ones that are being performed now, but even more questions are opening and left to be answered by clinical studies in the future. So hopefully we will have more clinical studies answering, not only can we or can we not use the novel agents but how should we use them? Should we sequence? Should we give it in combination? And to what patients?