ASH Review

The ASH conference took place almost two months ago, but Cancer Therapy Advisor has a nice interview with Dr. Connie Lee Batlevi, a Lymphoma expert from Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. Dr. Batlevi talks about some of the most important research on Follicular Lymphoma from the conference.

(I linked to a video series featuring Dr. Batlevi last September. She is both an MD and a PhD, going to medical school and then getting another doctorate, which is pretty amazing to me. Some weeks I can barely find the energy to write a blog post.)

Much of the interview focuses on bi-specifics, which seems like the choice of most experts for the biggest news out of the conference. Dr. Batlevi focuses on two different bi-specifics -- Glofitimab and Mosunetuzumab. I wrote about Mosunetuzumab, but not Glofitimab. Glofitimab was in a small study, with some patients receiving only the bi-specific and some also receiving Obinutuzumab. Patients who only received the Glofitimab had an 81% response rate, and those who received the combination had a 100% response rate.

That's a very good response rate, obviously. Better than the results from the Mosunetuzumab study, though those patients did better with side effects -- especially with Cytokine Release Syndrome, which can be very dangerous. 

As Dr. Batlevi notes, both bi-specifics also have good durations -- they work for a long time. As I said in my last post, it seems to me (and this is just my non-expert opinion) that duration of response is becoming more of a priority in the Lymphoma community.  With treatments like CAR-T (which Dr. Batlevi also discusses) potentially giving us longer and longer times in between treatments, and therefore fewer different treatments over our lifetime, and therefore fewer side effects building up, bi-specifics' duration is going to be just as important as its effectiveness and safety.

Thinking about my last post, where I wrote about the inhibitor Parsaclisib being withdrawn from the FDA approval process, it's ironic that the last treatment that Dr. Batlevi talks about is Parsaclisib. The results of a study of this treatment were presented at ASH, and obviously the interview with Dr. Batlevi was conducted before the FDA news. 

Still, her reaction to Parsaclisib was mixed, especially when compared to her enthusiasm for bi-specifics and CAR-T. She points out that when inhibitors are used on their own, they do have a response, but usually a Partial Response rather than a Complete Response. She thinks maybe they'll do better in combination with other agents.

Overall, it's a good interview. It confirms for me what I have been saying for the last few weeks about where the Lymphoma community seems to be heading. That might change, of course.  It will be interesting to see what the trends are in a few short months when the ASCO conference happens.

I'll let you know what I hear in the meantime.