Veit Bücklein, Dr Med, on Research Trends in Hematological Malignancy Cell Therapy

“I think one major topic that everyone’s talking about at the moment is sequencing of therapies. So, when it comes to treating patients with lymphoma, the big question always is, if we can find a smart strategy to sequence car t-cells vs bispecifics for example, because those are treatment platforms that are closely connected with each other, and I think there will be some more data on that.”

New research out of Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Münche in Munich, Germany, has shown that female patients have significantly superior outcomes then male patients following treatment with axicabtagene ciloleucel (axi-cel, Kite Pharma), even after adjusting other known risk variables. Veit Bücklein, Dr Med, a postdoctoral researcher at the university’s Laboratory for Translational Cancer Immunology presented the findings in a poster at the 2023 American Society of Hematology (ASH) Annual Meeting & Exposition, held December 9-12, in San Diego, California. Axi-cel is a chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapy approved for relapsed/refractory large B-cell lymphoma (LBCL) under the name Yescarta.

CGTLive spoke with Bücklein to learn more about the new research and about the state of and recent trends with research in cell therapy for hematological malignancies. He shared a couple of updates from the ASH meeting that he was excited by and stressed that 2023 was a big year for starting to explore sequencing of cell therapies and related immunotherapies in the field. He also talked about how 2023 was the first year of using CAR T-cell therapy in second-line treatment in Europe.

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.