ASCO24 Updates: Joshua Brody on Epcoritamab Immunotherapy for DLBCL

The American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) Annual Meeting is one of the largest and most prestigious conferences in the field of oncology. This year, the meeting took place from May 31 to June 4 in Chicago, Illinois. The event gathers oncologists, researchers, and healthcare professionals from around the world to discuss the latest advancements in cancer research, treatment, and patient care. Keynote sessions, research presentations, and panel discussions are typically part of the agenda, providing attendees with valuable insights into emerging trends and innovations in oncology.

This year, OncoDaily was at ASCO 2024 for the first time covering the meeting on-site. We had the pleasure of interviewing researchers who summarized the highlights of their work.

In this video, Dr. Joshua Brody, Director of the Lymphoma Immunotherapy Program at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, shared insights on ‘Subcutaneous epcoritamab + GemOx in patients with relapsed or refractory DLBCL: Updated results from EPCORE NHL-2.‘

Hi, my name is Josh Brody. I run the Lymphoma Immunotherapy Program at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York and very excited to be presenting here at the ASCO Annual Meeting results of the ARM5 cohort of the EPCOR NHL-02 trial. This is a multi-cohort, multi-center, multinational trial combining EPCORIDOMAB bispecific antibody immunotherapy with different standards of care through different types of lymphomas in different stages of therapy. 

So, the ARM5 cohort is combining standard of care third-line DLBCL therapy, gemcitabine plus oxaliplatin, with this novel immunotherapy EPCORIDOMAB, which is approved as a monotherapy in third line but not approved yet in combinations. So, this is an update of previously discussed data but an exciting update in that we have now accrued a total of 101 patients into the ARM5 cohort and the big punch line of the results is that the efficacy has been awesome, I would say. There is a response rate of greater than 80% and a complete remission rate of greater than 60% and this is quite extraordinary for third-line DLBCL patients. 

Just by way of context, gemOx on its own historically had about a 30 to 33% complete remission rate and for patients who were refractory to the prior line of therapy, much less even about a 10% CR rate. So now we have again 60% CR rates for a cohort, the majority of whom were refractory to their prior line of therapy and now in this 101 patient cohort we have considerable follow-up that many of those complete remissions were durable beyond 12 and 15 months now. So very exciting efficacy, the safety of the regimen was overall pretty good, most of the adverse effects I would say were attributable to the chemotherapy backbone and some of the side effects that were Epcoritamab specific, the most obvious one being cytokine release syndrome, were primarily low grade. 

About half of the patients had some CRS and only 1% of those was grade 3 and above. So almost all grade 1, grade 2 CRS. There was also some patients less than 10% with low grade icons or neurotoxicity and those were again low grade and thankfully quickly resolving. 

So overall a very effective regimen and overall a pretty well tolerated regimen. Notably in this cohort of patients the median age was 72. When we look at some other third line therapies like CAR T-cells or DLBCL, those seminal trials had much younger cohorts. 

So be able to have a highly effective pretty well tolerated regimen for on average older patients, super gratifying for us and for our patients and their families. So very excited to share this data here at ASCO. 

More videos and content from ASCO 2024 on OncoDaily.