Hematology-Oncology Immunotherapy Highlights at ASH 2025

Although the American Society of Hematology (ASH)'s Annual Meeting and Exposition includes the wide breadth of hematology treatment and practice, it remains a critically important yearly meeting for oncology specialists, particularly those focused on blood cancers. Furthermore, with the growing importance of immunotherapy in hematology/oncology, the meeting also serves as a key place for the presentation of innovative research in advanced therapeutics, such as chimeric antigen receptor T-cell (CAR-T) therapy

Midway through the 67th ASH Annual Meeting and Exposition, held December 6 to 9, 2025, in Orlando, Florida, CGTLive® sat down with Janna Minehart, MD, a clinical fellow in hematology oncology (Master of Science Translational Research Program) at the University of Pennsylvania, and the cohost of CGTLive’s own ImmunoLogic video podcast, to discuss the presentations and trends she paid particular attention to at the conference. Minehart highlighted 2 plenary sessions that covered compared treatment regimens in leukemias and also discussed some of the trends and growing areas of interest she noticed in her niche of the hematology field at this year's meeting.

CGTLive: What are your thoughts on the conference so far?

Janna Minehart, MD: It's really exciting for me to be here because it's my first time in person at ASH. I had a presentation in 2021 when it was still all virtual, and that's just clearly not the same experience so it's been really fun to be here in-person.

Is there anything specific you're paying attention to this year, or any presentations that you would like to highlight?

I just came out of the plenary session today that had 2 especially stunning presentations. One, the last plenary session upended almost 50 years of treatment for acute myeloid leukemia (AML). It was a study comparing traditional induction chemotherapy with azacitidine and venetoclax and just had really stunning results. It's really awe-inspiring to see something that is clearly going to be so practice-changing. I participated in the care of some of the patients on that trial as well, as a first-year fellow.

Another plenary presentation that was really exciting was a comparison of 3 different treatment regimens for chronic lymphocytic leukemia: continuous ibrutinib; obinutuzumab and venetoclax fixed duration; and ibrutinib and venetoclax fixed duration, and that showed noninferiority between these regimens, which I think will really influence a lot of people's practice when it comes to both perhaps avoiding the venetoclax/obinutuzumab, given higher rates of infections and neutropenia, and also favoring a fixed duration regimen that patients prefer, and also may leave the possibility of retreatment with a similar regimen in the future, as opposed to continuous therapy. Both of those were, I think, really, really exciting plenaries to see.

In the rest of the conference this weekend, I've been noticing a lot of what to me is new interest in circulating tumor DNA in lymphomas, primarily as a means of prognosticating, and in some ways even suggesting that it could supplant interim PET/CT scans. I think that that's super interesting. There's obviously all kinds of novel CARs and updates on CAR trials in lymphoma that I also get really excited about so it's just been a really fun weekend so far.

Are there any other trends you've noticed at the conference this year in your particular niche of interest?

I've been interested to see the increase in CAR products targeting multiple antigens. I think that that's really interesting, even though you don't see as much antigen escape in terms of losing CD19—it's usually more of a problem with CD20—I think that that's still an exciting new CAR approach.

I also went to an interesting talk where they discussed a secondary T-cell malignancy after CAR T-cell therapy and notably it had a Tet2 mutation, which is something that we've seen in about half of the reported CAR-positive T-cell lymphomas after CAR T-cell therapy, kind of further confirming that unique role of Tet2 loss in potentially driving these CAR-positive T-cell lymphomas. That was really, really exciting, as well.

This transcript has been edited for clarity.

For more coverage of ASH 2025, click here.