Tag: Hodgkin lymphoma

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Combination Therapy for Patients with Advanced Classic Hodgkin Lymphoma Boosts 1-year Survival

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Results from a Phase 3 trial of patients with advanced Stage (3 or 4) classic Hodgkin lymphoma who underwent initial treatment with nivolumab, a PD-1 checkpoint inhibitor, and AVD chemotherapy (N-AVD) showed that they had a significantly lower risk cancer worsening than patients treated with brentuximab vedotin, a monoclonal antibody, and AVD (BV-AVD) a year after starting treatment.

Ninety-four percent of adolescent and adult patients in the N-AVD group had progression-free survival compared with 86% in the BV-AVD arm. N-AVD was also well-tolerated as there were few serious immune-related side effects in the S1826 trial. The median follow-up was 12.1 months.

These late-breaking findings were presented by lead investigator Alex Herrera, MD, at ASCO’s 2023 Plenary Session.

“The results are remarkable. The combination of nivolumab and chemotherapy is potent and safe in patients with Stage 3 or 4 classic Hodgkin lymphoma as an initial treatment,” said Herrera. “The therapy is poised to be a standard for treatment of advanced Hodgkin lymphoma. This is indeed great news for patients with this cancer as there is another effective and safe treatment option for them.”

The S1826 trial is the largest classic Hodgkin lymphoma study ever conducted in the NCI’s National Clinical Trials Network and is also representative of a diverse patient population. About a quarter of the enrolled patients were Black or Hispanic. A partnership with the Children’s Oncology Group (COG) helped ensure the trial included young adolescents, and a quarter of enrolled patients were younger than 18 years old. Nearly two-thirds of all patients had Stage 4 cancer.

“This study speaks to the power of the National Clinical Trials Network and is an excellent example of the transformative work that the NCI funds,” said senior author Jonathan Friedberg, MS, MMSc. “Hodgkin lymphoma is not a common disease and the NCTN enabled a large network of more than 200 paediatric and adult community providers and academic medical centres to work together. Because of that, we were able to get data very quickly and directly impact patient care. This was a critical investment in cancer research and treatment.”

Patients with Stage 3 or 4 classic Hodgkin lymphoma who had not been previously treated and were age 12 or older were eligible for the trial. Of a total of 976 eligible patients, 489 were enrolled in the N-AVD arm (nivolumab plus Adriamycin, vinblastine and dacarbazine), while 487 were part of the BV-AVD group. Each group received six infusion cycles of each combination therapy.

As expected with combination chemotherapy, the most common side effects included gastrointestinal and hematologic toxicities, and fatigue. However, less than 1% of patients needed radiation after trial treatment, which is a dramatic reduction in the proportion of patients being initially treated for Hodgkin lymphoma who need radiation, especially among paediatric patients.

“The ability to maintain high rates of relapse-free survival with minimal use of radiation therapy in children with newly diagnosed advanced stage Hodgkin lymphoma will be a paradigm shift,” said Sharon Castellino, MD, MSc, chair of the COG Hodgkin lymphoma committee and director of the Leukemia and Lymphoma Program at the Aflac Cancer and Blood Disorders Center, Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, Winship Cancer Institute at Emory University.

Brentuximab vedotin was the first antibody-drug conjugate developed for classic Hodgkin lymphoma. Several studies have demonstrated that incorporating the therapy into frontline treatment improves progression-free survival and overall survival. Despite improved outcomes, there are still serious side effects; relapses can occur.

“There is definitely a need to improve frontline therapies for Hodgkin lymphoma, particularly because a disproportionate number of patients with this disease are teens and young adults,” Herrera added.

Next steps for the trial include following patients to measure the durability of progression-free survival, overall survival and other patient outcomes.

Source: PR Newswire

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Higher Risk of Lymphoma in Patients Suffering from IBD

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Karolinska Institutet researchers have found that the risk of developing lymphoma is slightly elevated in inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) and, in recent years has been on the rise in patients with Crohn’s disease. Publishing in Clinical Gastroenterology and Hepatology, the researchers also observed a risk increase in patients taking modern IBD drugs, which was less strong for those not taking them. Thus, the lymphoma risk could be affected by both the medication and the disease activity itself.

Inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), which includes Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis, is a chronic intestinal inflammation that can increase the risk of developing lymph node cancer (lymphoma), a disease that affects the immune system.  

“Previous studies of the lymphoma risk of IBD have been too small to draw reliable conclusions,” says the study’s first author Ola Olén, consultant and docent at the Department of Medicine (Solna), Karolinska Institutet. “The studies have not taken into account of important systematic errors or been representative of today’s IBD patients.”  

The present study included almost 170 000 IBD patients identified in Swedish and Danish national registries between 1969 and 2019. Compared to patients with a matched population without IBD, patients with both Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis had a higher risk of lymphoma. The highest risk was in patients with Crohn’s disease, the increase being driven mainly by T-cell lymphoma and aggressive B-cell lymphoma.

“We found an elevated relative risk of different types of lymphoma in both Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis, but we need to point out that the absolute risk is very low,” says the study’s last author Jonas F Ludvigsson, consultant and professor at Karolinska Institutet.

“The increase in risk equates to only one extra case of lymphoma in 1000 people with IBD, who were followed for ten years.”

“Both inflammation and treatment play a part”

The risk of lymphoma has increased in patients with Crohn’s disease over the past two decades, which coincides with the increasing use of immunomodulating drugs for IBD. While the highest risk of developing the cancer was observed in patients who had received these drugs, the researchers found that patients who were not on such medication were also at a higher risk of lymphoma. 

“This finding indicates that both the inflammation in itself and its treatment play a part,” says Dr Olén. “Since there’s a lot of talk about the lymphoma risk associated with immunomodulating drugs, it’s important to make it clear that also the disease and the inflammation per se seem to drive the development of lymphoma. One has to take account of this and discuss it when prescribing modern treatments where there might be a concern that they will increase the risk of lymphoma.” 

Dr Olén says the teamaims to use more detailed data to determine whether the disease itself or its treatment is more important in terms of lymphoma risk.

Source: Karolinska Institutet

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CVD Risk Greater Than Direct Risk from Hodgkin Lymphoma

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Although new treatments have improved the survival chances of patients with Hodgkin lymphoma (HL), these therapies can also increase the risk of cardiovascular disease (CVD). A recent study published in CANCER reveals that people with early-stage HL, which affects the lymphatic system, are now at higher risk of dying from CVD than from cancer.

The multicentre study included 15 889 children and adults in the United States who were diagnosed with HL between 1983 and 2015. “We conducted this study because cardiovascular disease may be the most common non-malignant long-term complication and a prevalent cause for non-malignant death following treatment in HL survivors,” said senior author Caiwen Ou, MD, PhD, of Southern Medical University in China.

Prof Ou and colleagues found that among patients with stage I and stage II classic HL, the proportion of CVD mortality exceeded the proportion of classic HL mortality after about 60 and 120 months of follow-up, respectively. The cumulative incidence of CVD mortality also exceeded that of HL and other cancers over time. In recent decades, the mortality risk from classic HL dropped sharply, but CVD mortality risk among patients with classic HL fell slowly or even remained unchanged among some groups.

The analysis also revealed that patients with stage I or stage II classic HL experienced a higher risk of CVD mortality than the general population at almost all follow-up intervals.

“Our results indicate that more effective measures are needed to reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease-related deaths in classic HL survivors,” said co-author Weijing Feng, MD, PhD.

Source: EurekAlert!