In the ZUMA-7 trial, at a median follow-up of 24.9 months, patients randomly assigned to receive CAR T-cell therapy with axicabtagene ciloleucel, or axi-cell (Yescarta) had a median event-free survival (EFS) of 8.3 months, compared with 2 months for patients randomly assigned to standard-of-care chemoimmunotherapy, reported Frederick L. Locke, MD, from the Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa, Florida.

In TRANSFORM, comparing the CAR T construct lisocabtagene maraleucel, or liso-cel (Breyanzi) with standard-of-care second-line chemotherapy, median EFS was 10.1 months with liso-cel, compared with 2.3 months with standard of care, reported Manali Kamdar, MD, from the University of Colorado Cancer Center in Aurora.

The trials differed slightly in eligibility criteria and other details, but their overall results show great promise for improving second-line therapy for patients with relapsed or refractory large B cell lymphomas (LBCL), commented Laurie Sehn, MD, MPH, from the BC Cancer Centre for Lymphoid Cancer in Vancouver, Canada.

“It’s really remarkable that the results are so far in favor of the CAR T-cell therapy that I think it’s inevitable that this will become the standard of care,” Sehn commented. She was not an investigator on either of the two trials.I think it’s inevitable that this will become the standard of care. Dr Laurie Sehn, BC Cancer Centre for Lymphoid Cancer

Sehn was speaking at a press briefing here at the 2021 American Society of Hematology (ASH) annual meeting. The new data from the two studies were presented at oral sessions, and the results from ZUMA-7 were also simultaneously published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

“For somebody who treats patients with large B-cell lymphoma like I do, it’s incredibly frustrating when patients fail frontline therapy,” Sehn said. “We come into the second line with more chemotherapy and at higher doses to try and slam things down hard. Particularly for the patients who were enrolled in these studies, which were the worst of the worst — the patients who are either refractory to chemotherapy or relapsed relatively early, within 1 year — it’s not surprising that coming in with a novel approach and a cellular therapy that has a proven curative capacity may have outperformed coming in with more chemotherapy.”

In an interview with Medscape Medical News, Locke said that, based on the findings of ZUMA-7 trial that he presented, it’s likely that chemotherapy in the second-line setting for relapsed/refractory LBCL will largely fall by the wayside.

The first question is to identify the patients who can tolerate CAR T-cell therapy. “We need to refer these patients to a CAR T-cell center to make that decision. That decision really can’t be made in the local oncologist’s office,” he said. “That being said, there are patients who need urgent therapy, and they may need to get second-line chemotherapy right away.”