A targeted antibody therapy is helping patients with a hard-to-treat form of lymphoma live longer. New trial results show that glofitamab, a bispecific antibody, extends survival in people with relapsed or refractory diffuse large B-cell lymphoma (DLBCL) who cannot receive a stem cell transplant.
How the trial worked
The phase 3 STARGLO trial enrolled 274 patients with relapsed or refractory DLBCL. All had received at least one prior line of therapy and were ineligible for or had refused an autologous stem cell transplant.
Patients were randomly assigned to receive glofitamab plus gemcitabine and oxaliplatin (GemOx) or rituximab plus GemOx. The two-to-one randomization gave 183 patients the glofitamab regimen and 91 the rituximab regimen.
Longer survival, more side effects
Glofitamab is a bispecific antibody that binds two targets at once: CD20 on lymphoma cells and CD3 on immune T cells. This design pulls the immune system directly to the cancer.
Patients in the glofitamab arm lived longer overall and went longer without their disease progressing. Serious and high-grade side effects were more common with glofitamab-GemOx, although those patients also received substantially more treatment over a longer period.
What it means for patients
The results support glofitamab-GemOx as a treatment option for transplant-ineligible patients, a group with few good choices once standard therapy stops working.
Researchers caution that the trial compared glofitamab against rituximab, not against newer cellular or bispecific therapies. The findings also come from a selected population, so they may not apply to all patients with relapsed or refractory disease.
Still, the survival benefit has held up in follow-up data, and the treatment is already being used in clinical practice for this difficult group of patients.