Piers Blombery, MBBS, PhD, on More ctDNA, MRD Biomarker Use in Blood Cancer for 2024

“2023 showed further establishment of the utility of genomics in care of blood cancers. I think now we can say it's standard of care in all patients with blood cancer to have genetic testing to guide their therapy, whether you’ve got myeloma, lymphoma, CLL, AML, I don’t think it matters. Genomics clearly contributes across the landscape... Genomics both for diagnosis and for minimal residual disease is where I see the big things happening for 2024.”

This is the third part of an interview. To view the second part, click here.

Findings from a case study of chimeric antigen receptor (CAR)+ T-cell lymphoma in a patient with multiple myeloma treated with ciltacabtagene ciloleucel (Carvykti; Janssen, Legend Biotech) in the phase 3 CARTITUDE-4 study (NCT04181827) were reported in an abstract accepted to the 2023 American Society of Hematology (ASH) Annual Meeting & Exposition, held December 9-12, in San Diego, California, as an online publication. The research came out of Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre in Australia.

CGTLive spoke with the abstract’s senior author, Piers Blombery, MBBS, PhD, associate professor, , and head, Wilson Centre for Blood Cancer Genomics, to learn more about the case study. During the ASH meeting, Blombery also moderated a workshop on Translational Molecular Diagnostics for the third year in a row, and he shared some big topics from the workshop, including classification systems for hematologic malignancies. Blombery also shared topics from ASH he was excited to see, including more work with circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) as a predictive biomarker in large B-cell lymphoma, as well as trends he thinks will grow in the field in 2024.

Click here to view more coverage of the ASH 2023 meeting.

REFERENCE

Harrison SJ. Nguyen T, Rahman M, et al. CAR+ T-Cell lymphoma post ciltacabtagene autoleucel therapy for relapsed refractory multiple myeloma. Blood (2023): 142; 1. 6939. doi: 10.1182/blood-2023-178806