Epcoritamab Demonstrates Complete Responses at 2 Years in R/R LBCL

At the 2025 American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) Annual Meeting, Julie M. Vose, MD, MBA, presented results from the pivotal phase 2 EPCORE NHL-1 trial (NCT03625037) that evaluated the efficacy of epcoritamab-bysp (Epkinly) in patients with relapsed/refractory B-cell lymphoma.

According to Vose, the treatment was able to elicit positive responses, especially in patients who were in remission 2 years after starting therapy. Even at 3 years, the trial found that 96% of patients remained in complete remission. The trial also had a patient population with less bulky disease, less amount of disease, and fewer treatments.

Vose is the George and Peggy Payne Distinguished Chair of Oncology, the chief of the Division of Oncology and Hematology, and a professor in the Division of Oncology and Hematology at the University of Nebraska Medical Center, and co–editor in chief of ONCOLOGY®.

Transcript:

The complete response rate was around 40%, and this analysis is a little bit different in that we’re looking at patients who were still in remission 2 years after initiating therapy. The subset analysis was to see what happened to those patients beyond the 2 years. At the 2-year mark for those patients who were in a complete remission, looking further at a 3-year time frame, 96% of those patients were still in complete remission, and had maintained that during that time period. This is a different type of analysis, looking at those long-term patients who benefited from the treatment.

These findings show that we do have alternatives for those patients now that are relatively well tolerated and have a high complete response rate. Those patients who are in a complete response tend to stay in complete response, if it’s molecularly, and by PET or other scanning, also negative. It’s a good alternative for those patients, and eventually they get down to less frequent dosing and toxicity after the first cycle is well tolerated. It’s a good alternative for those in certain patient populations.

The patients who were in complete response at 2 years, by analysis, tended to have less bulky disease, less amount of disease, and had received fewer prior therapies, so [they] were perhaps less resistant. That’s true in almost all our treatments. Those characteristics are true in any treatment that we do, so it’s not too surprising. [They] continued to be monitored long term.

Reference

Karimi YH, Vose JM, Clausen MR, et al. Novel analysis of 3-y results from the pivotal EPCORE NHL-1 study: Outcomes in patients (pts) with relapsed/refractory large B-cell lymphoma (R/R LBCL) and complete response (CR) at 2 y with epcoritamab (epcor) monotherapy. J Clin Oncol. 2025;43(suppl 16):7043. doi:10.1200/JCO.2025.43.16_suppl.7043