Choosing Treatment Options and Managing Toxicities for Patients With R/R Follicular Lymphoma

At the 2023 Great Debates & Updates in Hematologic Malignancies meeting in Boston, Massachusetts, Carla Casulo, MD, University of Rochester, Rochester, New York, briefly discusses her presentation on available treatment options for relapsed/refractory (R/R) follicular lymphoma (FL), as well as management of various treatment-related toxicities.

Transcript:

Hi, my name is Carla Casulo, and I'm at the Great Debates & Updates in Hematologic Malignancies in Boston. Today, I was speaking about treatment options in patients with relapsed/refractory follicular lymphoma. I talked about some of the unmet needs [of] patients that have relapsed/refractory follicular lymphoma. We reviewed the importance of novel agents [and] clinical trials. 

We also talked about how patients who are at the third line or later have short progression-free survival (PFS), underscoring the need for better and safer treatments. We reviewed the different classes of different agents in relapse and refractory follicular lymphoma, including [chimeric antigen receptor] (CAR) T-cell therapy, bispecific antibody therapy, EZH2 inhibition, and we talked about some of the novel combinations that are being developed. We talked about some of the allogeneic CAR T-cells that are coming out, and we talked about some of the things to anticipate in later lines of treatment.

In conclusion, the focus of the talk was how to sequence and manage different treatment-related toxicities, including cytokine release syndrome (CRS) [and] neurotoxicity for CAR T-cells. We talked about managing and sequencing treatments, including bispecific antibodies. We also reviewed some of the commonly experienced toxicities in the PI3 kinase inhibitor class that are no longer available for most patients with follicular lymphoma. 

The focus was on when to select treatment based on timeshare progression, when to biopsy someone with relapsed/refractory disease, how to navigate some of the toxicities that emerge with some of these novel agents, and what to expect with some new combinations that are coming down the pike.

Source: 

Casulo, C. Managing Relapsed/Refractory Follicular Lymphoma: Novel Therapeutic Strategies Across Treatment Lines. Presented at the Great Debates and Updates in Hematologic Malignancies Meeting; August 17-19, 2023; Boston, Massachusetts.