ICML 2023 | Improving MRD assessment and response criteria in DLBCL: insights into PhasED-Seq

When we treat patients with aggressive lymphoma, it’s critical that they achieve a complete response or what we might call a remission. And certainly in most cases, the therapy is designed to cure the patient. So there’s been a lot of interest in improving the way we define complete response. Currently, we define it principally with imaging scans such as PET CT scans, but we know that they are frequently positive even when patients are actually in remission. So one of the tests that’s emerged now that can help us understand who truly is in remission are these assays for circulating tumor DNA. Now, previous efforts at developing an assay, those assays have had limited analytical sensitivity, which means at the end of therapy, when the level of tumor is very, very low, it’s been unable to detect that. But there’s a new assay called PhasED-Seq that has improved analytical sensitivity. And what we were able to show is that improved analytical sensitivity was able to actually detect disease at very, very low levels at the end of therapy. So that offers a potential advantage over imaging scans and maybe someday will be part of our response criteria, the way we actually define remission for patients who are getting therapy for diffuse large B-cell lymphoma.