Laurie H. Sehn, MD, MPH

The moderator of the session, Laurie H. Sehn, MD, MPH, Clinical Professor at the BC Cancer Centre for Lymphoid Cancer and University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada, called the results of TRANSFORM trial “quite remarkable” and said chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapy has the potential to transform care for this high-risk population of patients.

“For somebody who actually treats patients with large B-cell lymphoma, like I do, it’s incredibly frustrating when patients fail to respond to front-line therapy,” said Dr. Sehn, who noted that standard treatment in the second-line setting has been more chemotherapy at higher doses. “The patients enrolled in this study were at the highest risk: either refractory to chemotherapy or relapsed relatively early within 1 year.”

“It’s not surprising that [treatment] with a novel approach and a cellular therapy that has proven curative capacity in the third-line setting may have outperformed [treatment] with more chemotherapy,” Dr. Sehn continued. “This was the logical study to undertake, and it’s really remarkable that the results so far favor the CAR T-cell therapy. I think it’s inevitable that CAR T-cell therapy will become the standard of care in this setting,” she added. 

DISCLOSURE: Dr. Sehn reported financial relationships with Teva, Roche/Genentech, Debiopharm, Novartis, Genmab, AbbVie, Acerta, Amgen, Apobiologix, AstraZeneca, Celgene, Gilead, Incyte, Janssen, Kite, Karyopharm Therapeutics, Lundbeck, Merck, MorphoSys, Sandoz, Seattle Genetics, Takeda, TG Therapeutics, and Verastem.