We treated patients with relapsed and refractory Burkitt lymphoma with Blincyto. This drug is known for ALL, is approved there. In this relapsed/refractory patient population it’s really hard to get these patients in remission, really hard to treat and the overall response rates and the cure rates are not there. What we tried is to give them Blincyto and we scheduled them, we started with 28μg per day for four days and then we escalated to 112μg and treated them for 52 days. This we called the induction phase and then we did two cycles of consolidation phase and four cycles of maintenance.
We actually treated three patients so it’s really early data there but we have two patients that did not respond to Blincyto but had one patient that really got into a complete remission after one cycle. After this we tried to consolidate him. We had an autologous transplant, he was then also in CR but relapsed really early one month later with Burkitt leukaemia. So we did him on retreatment with Blincyto and got a CR and did the consolidation and maintenance phase. Now the patient is one year off treatment, still in MRD negative remission, recovered really great, did long-term long distance runs and really happy to have these results with him.

What are the next steps?

What we do with the Blincyto in Burkitt’s is we do an IIT and do a trial there within the German ALL group. Hopefully this will start the end of the year.