Research from a pilot trial presented at the 2020 American Society of Hematology (ASH) Annual Meeting found above average complete response and disease-free survival rates for patients with DLBCL.
Armin Ghobadi, MD, of Washington University in St. Louis School of Medicine spoke with CancerNetwork about the latest findings from his presentation at ASH regarding blinatumomab (Blincyto) consolidation post autologous hematopoietic stem-cell transplantation in patients with diffuse large B-cell lymphoma (DLBCL).
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So, in terms of complete response (CR), 100 days after BEAM (carmustine, etoposide, cytarabine, and melphalan), you expect roughly around 90% of patients to be in complete remission. Here, we had 100% of patients at CR. And if you look at 1 or 2 years later, you expect a disease-free survival around 50% to 60%. So, what we saw here was fitting of what we expect from a BEAM autologous stem-cell transplantation.
The (2 things) that I thought (were) interesting (and) surprising when I saw it was MRD before BEAM and after BEAM. We saw that there were patients that were minimal residual disease-positive that achieved MRD-negative status after blinatumomab. And we found out that CD8/CD4 ratio early on after autologous transplant is actually an indicator of response and durable response to this treatment after BEAM autologous transplant. We saw that even in a small number of a pilot trial.