Veit Bücklein, Dr Med, on Looking Closer Into Differences in Response, Hematotoxicity After CAR T

“The findings that we have are from a small subset of the patients and that means we have to be careful with putting too much interpretation into that, but we do see that there are no significant differences in CAR T-cell expansion, although we know that CAR T-cell expansion is important for response to CAR T-cell therapy.”

Female patients have significantly superior outcomes then male patients following treatment with axicabtageneciloleucel (axi-cel, Kite Pharma), even after adjusting other known risk variables.Axi-cel is a chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapy approved for relapsed/refractory large B-cell lymphoma (LBCL) under the name Yescarta. These data were presented in a poster at the 2023 American Society of Hematology (ASH) Annual Meeting & Exposition, held December 9-12, in San Diego, California by Veit Bücklein, Dr Med, postdoctoral researcher, Laboratory for Translational Cancer Immunology, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Münche.

Bücklein and colleagues analyzed data from 119 male and 95 female patients with similar baseline patient characteristics that had similar safety outcomes, however, female patients had better overall response rate, progression free survival rate, and overall survival. CGTLive spoke with Bücklein to learn more about the continuing research that he and his colleagues are conducting, including looking closer at differences with lymphodepletion. He stressed that these data have only been seen in a small subset of patients and must be further examined before drawing conclusions. He also shared additional research his group is looking at, including differences in response after bispecific antibody therapy and hematotoxicity after CAR T-cell therapy.

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

REFERENCE

Buecklein VL, Rejeski K, Perez A, et al. Impact of sex on clinical outcomes after CD19 CAR T-cell therapy for large B-cell lymphoma: Response and survival are significantly superior in female compared to male patients. Presented at: 2023 ASH Annual Meeting & Exposition, December 9-12; San Diego, California. Abstract 3787.