I have another presentation at this meeting that regards the diffuse large B-cell lymphoma, newly diagnosed but elderly and frail, so with contraindications to receive full dose chemo or reduced dose chemoimmunotherapy. These patients are usually treated in a palliative way and at this meeting I will present tomorrow a single-arm phase II study with epcoritamab monotherapy for these patients.

We treated 66 patients without chemo, just with bispecific antibodies in the beginning in a frail population with a median age of 82 years old with at least three major comorbidities. 97% of these patients had cardiac comorbidities that made them ineligible to doxorubicin-containing regimens.

Epcoritamab monotherapy was able to induce a 57% complete remission rate, a 50% progression free survival at one year, making treatment feasible also with a chemo-free approach, also for patients that are usually treated without a curative intent. So this is another tool that has opened the way to expand our treatment arms in diffuse large B-cell lymphoma.

What could be the clinical significance of these results?

It’s important to offer to more and more patients with newly-diagnosed diffuse large B-cell lymphoma a possibility to be treated. Because you have to consider that the median age of diffuse large B-cell lymphoma is around 70 and most of our patients over 70 have some comorbidities that make them ineligible to chemotherapy. So it’s important to find out different regimens without chemo that are safe and that, at the same time, can be curative for the patient.