Frederick Locke, MD, and Michael Jain, MD, PhD, on Why Some Patients With Lymphoma Do Not Respond to Cellular Immunotherapy

A new observational study suggests that for certain patients with large B-cell lymphoma, responses to chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapy may be suboptimal despite high rates of tumor responses in more than 80% in the overall patient population.

CancerNetwork® was joined Frederick Locke, MD, vice chair of the Blood and Marrow Transplant and Cellular Immunotherapy Department and co-leader of the Immuno-Oncology Program, and Michael Jain, MD, PhD, assistant member of the Blood and Marrow Transplant and Cellular Immunotherapy Department, both of the Moffitt Cancer Center.

“We are at the beginning of understanding what are the tumor-type or disease-specific characteristics that affect whether or not CAR T-cell therapy is even a good cancer therapy at all,” Jain said. “Some of the things that we are finding out in lymphoma are maybe applicable broadly to solid tumors or other types of disease that we are trying to treat with CAR T-cell therapy.”

In the study discussed, 105 patients treated with axicabtagene ciloleucel (Yescarta) had blood and tumor samples collected to determine if patients fell into one of 2 categories: durable responders, or those with remission at a minimum of 6 months of follow-up; and nondurable responders who experienced lymphoma relapse.

This segment comes from the CancerNetwork® portion of the MJH Life Sciences™ Medical World News®, airing daily on all MJH Life Sciences™ channels.

Reference:

Jain MD, Zhao H, Wang X, et al. Tumor interferon signaling and suppressive myeloid cells associate with CAR T cell failure in large B cell lymphoma. Blood. Published January 15, 2021. doi:10.1182/blood.2020007445.