Exploring a Time-to-Relapse Analysis for Rituximab and Transplant in MCL

Peter A. Riedell, MD, an assistant professor of medicine at the University of Chicago Medicine, discusses the clinical implication of using frontline high-dose rituximab (Rituxan)-based therapy and autologous hematopoietic cell transplantation (AHCT) in patients with mantle cell lymphoma (MCL) in an analysis of time to relapse.

Riedell says this analysis will give researchers a better understanding of patients who relapse after frontline AHCT. There have been data presented in other subtypes of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, particularly follicular lymphoma, that gives the researchers in this setting a sense of the timing of relapse and how that may affect outcomes for patients with MCL in the long term.

These data give a better understanding of patients with MCL who relapse early after rituximab and AHCT. In particular, patients who relapsed by the 18-month landmark timepoint after AHCT had a very poor overall survival. These patients likely require different therapeutic approaches in the frontline setting or, more so, in the relapsed setting compared with conventional treatment, according to Riedell. He is talking about treatments such as inclusion in currently enrolling clinical trials or the utilization of chimeric antigen receptor T-cell therapy as novel approaches.