Amitkumar Mehta, MD, MBA, associate professor of medicine and director of the lymphoma and chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapy programs, University of Alabama at Birmingham, highlights the need for novel therapy approaches for patients with high-risk mantle cell lymphoma (MCL).
Amitkumar Mehta, MD, MBA, board-certified hematologist and associate professor of medicine and director of the lymphoma and chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapy programs, University of Alabama at Birmingham, highlights the findings from his research paper, "Outcomes of Patients with Blastoid and Pleomorphic Variant Mantle Cell Lymphoma," and the need for novel therapy approaches for patients with high-risk mantle cell lymphoma.
Transcript
Can you provide an overview of your study on patient outcomes for blastoid and pleomorphic variants of mantle cell lymphoma?
Mantle cell lymphoma is a very rare lymphoma. Over a period of years now, we have realized that mantle cell lymphoma, you can clearly put in 3 buckets: One is low-grade mantle, the other one is very high-grade mantle. And when I say very high-grade, that is a specific characteristic on that blastoid variant, pleomorphic variant, or TP53 variant. The idea of that study is to look [at] how those patients fare in a real-world setting with the treatment, standard of care, that they received. It was not a surprising outcome because these patients do not do well.
This is kind of a benchmark. So, if you have high-risk patients who are not doing well with a conventional therapy, what it tells you is, if this is the benchmark, what the new treatments are doing in that setting—how the BTK inhibitors are working in that setting, how a noncovalent BTK inhibitor will work in that setting, or how CAR T will work in those patients. And we know that all of those have worked better than conventional chemotherapy in pleomorphic, blastoid, and TP53-altered mantle cell lymphoma.
So the bigger question with this kind of study [that] comes up is whether we can move these therapies up front in an earlier phase rather than waiting and using the therapies which are not very active. So, there was no surprise, but it was a good benchmark with a large data set to kind of look at it and say, yes, we will need more different approaches to deal with this high-risk mantle cell lymphoma.
Dr Kathy Zackowski Discusses the Importance of Rehabilitation Research and Trials in MS
April 26th 2024Kathy Zackowski, PhD, National MS Society, expresses the inherent value of quality rehabilitation trials for broadening clinical understandings of multiple sclerosis (MS) and bettering patient outcomes.
Read More
Examining Low-Value Cancer Care Trends Amidst the COVID-19 Pandemic
April 25th 2024On this episode of Managed Care Cast, we're talking with the authors of a study published in the April 2024 issue of The American Journal of Managed Care® about their findings on the rates of low-value cancer care services throughout the COVID-19 pandemic.
Listen
Empowering Community Health Through Wellness and Faith
April 23rd 2024To help celebrate and recognize National Minority Health Month, we are bringing you a special month-long podcast series with our Strategic Alliance Partner, UPMC Health Plan. In the third episode, Camille Clarke-Smith, EdD, MS, CHES, CPT, discusses approaching community health holistically through spiritual and community engagement.
Listen
Kaiser Permanente was hit by a data breach in mid-April, impacting 13.4 million health plan members; GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) sued Pfizer and BioNTech for allegedly infringing on its messenger RNA technology patents in the companies’ COVID-19 vaccines; the CDC announced the first-known HIV cases transmitted via cosmetic injections.
Read More