Unmet Needs in MCL
Frederick Locke, MD, addresses the ongoing unmet needs for patients with mantle cell lymphoma such as the role of novel agents in the upfront setting.
Frederick Locke, MD: Patients with mantle cell lymphoma do have some ongoing unmet needs. We need to better understand those high-risk features. We need to be sure that those high-risk features are looked for at the time of diagnosis, even in community pathologists’ offices, so we can understand very early on the likely trajectory of this patient. Is this a patient who is going to get a good response with R-CHOP [rituximab, cyclophosphamide, doxorubicin, vincristine, prednisone] chemotherapy or other combination chemotherapy, and can then get a consolidative autologous transplant and be in remission for a decade or longer? Or is this a patient who is unlikely to benefit from that additional consolidative autologous transplant, where we need to be thinking about CAR [chimeric antigen receptor] T-cell therapy earlier? We also don’t know the role of novel agents in the up-front setting. There are ongoing multicenter, cooperative group clinical trials testing combination therapies, incorporating BTK inhibitors and other novel agents as part of the frontline regimen so we can understand, even in young and fit and healthy patients, whether they afford better opportunity for ongoing durable remission than the standard chemotherapy, combination chemotherapy, and autologous stem cell transplant consolidation.
This transcript was edited for clarity.
