Dr Craig Portell Highlights New and Exciting Treatments for Non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma

Craig Portell, MD, of the University of Virginia Health System, highlights some of the latest and most exciting treatments in non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, including CAR-T therapies and targeted therapies such as venetoclax.

Transcript

What is the latest in treatments for non-Hodgkin's lymphoma?

There are many new and exciting treatments for non-Hodgkin's lymphoma that are coming up. Some of them are changing the standard rituximab antibody, doing new novel ways of targeting CD20 in non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. Some of them are having very good outcomes and prolonging progression-free survival when compared to rituximab.

There's also cellular therapies such as CAR therapy where patients' own T cells are activated and stimulated to attack non-Hodgkin's lymphoma cells as well as other normal B cells. It's kind of targeted way of doing an allogeneic stem cell transplant. Those are labor intensive and difficult to do but as we move forward in the field, as it gets easier to do, I think those are going to be very promising.

Of course, we also have many small molecule targeted therapies that are becoming increasingly used in non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, including ibrutinib, idelalisib, and any of the other targeted therapies in the B-cell receptor pathway. Finally, one of the more exciting drugs in targeted therapy is venetoclax. We just recently had a publication out of Journal of Clinical Oncology, which showed efficacy of venetoclax; how we use it and where we use it, and monitoring for tumor lysis is very important when we move to using venetoclax more and more in non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.