Guests Dr. Andrea Necchi, Dr. Ashish Kamat and host Dr. Davide Soldato discuss JCO article "End Points for the Next-Generation Bladder-Sparing Perioperative Trials for Patients With Muscle-Invasive Bladder Cancer," focusing on the evolving treatment landscape of MIBC (muscle-invasive bladder cancer) and the need to properly design novel trials investigating non-operative management while including the incorporation of biomarkers and patient perspectives in clinical trials.

TRANSCRIPT

The disclosures for guests on this podcast can be found in the show notes.

Dr. Davide Soldato: Hello and welcome to JCO After Hours, the podcast where we sit down with authors from some of the latest articles published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology. I am your host, Dr. Davide Soldato, medical oncologist at Ospedale San Martino in Genoa, Italy.

Today we are joined by JCO authors Andrea Necchi, Associate Professor of Medical Oncology at University San Raffaele and Medical Oncology at Ospedale San Raffaele in Milan, Italy, and Ashish Kamat, Professor of Urologic Oncology and Cancer Research at University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. Both Professor Necchi and Professor Kamat are internationally recognized experts in the field of genitourinary malignancy and particularly in bladder cancer.

Today we will be discussing the article titled "Endpoints for the Next Generation Bladder-Sparing Perioperative Trials for Patients with Muscle-Invasive Bladder Cancer."

So thank you for speaking with us, Professor Necchi and Professor Kamat.

Dr. Andrea Necchi: Thank you, Davide, and thank you JCO for the opportunity.

Dr. Ashish Kamat: Yeah, absolutely. It is a great honor and privilege to be discussing this very important article with you. So thank you for the invitation.

Dr. Davide Soldato: The article that you just published in JCO reports the results of a consensus meeting that was held among experts in the field of genitourinary malignancy and particularly for bladder cancer. So the objective was really to define endpoints for a novel generation of trials among patients diagnosed with muscle-invasive bladder cancer. So my first question would be: what is the change in clinical practice and in clinical evidence that we have right now that prompted the start of such consensus in 2025?

Dr. Andrea Necchi: So, we are living so many changes in the treatment paradigm of patients with muscle-invasive bladder cancer. In general, patients diagnosed with bladder cancer or urothelial cancer today, thanks to the advent of immunotherapy or immunotherapy combinations, and today thanks to the advent of novel antibody-drug conjugates like enfortumab vedotin in combination with immunotherapy that are actually changing the landscape of treatment of patients with metastatic disease and also are entering quite fast into the treatment paradigm of patients with organ-confined disease with a lot of clinical trials testing these combination therapies, neoadjuvantly or adjuvantly, before or after radical cystectomy.

Having said that, by potentiating the efficacy of systemic therapy, an increasing number of patients that receive neoadjuvant therapy of any kind, at a certain point in time, result to have achieved a deep response to systemic therapy, evaluated radiologically with conventional imaging, CT scan or MRI, or with cystoscopy or with other urology-based techniques, urinary cytology, and so. And based on the fact that they achieve a complete response, so no residual viable disease after systemic therapy, they raise concern about the fact that they have to undergo surgery like radical cystectomy that is quite impactful for their quality of life and for the future of their lives after the surgery. So the point that the patients are raising, and the patients are raising this point, is primarily due to the efficacy of systemic therapy.

And we have seen so many cases fortunately achieving a deep response. So the question about what to do with the patient that at a certain point, at the start with the commitment to radical cystectomy, but at a certain point in time change their mind towards something else if possible, depending on the fact that they have achieved a deep response, is something that is a question and is a need to which we have to provide data, information, and guidance in general to the patients.

Dr. Davide Soldato: If we look at the population that the recommendations were formulated for, we are mainly speaking about patients who would be fit for cystectomy, and this is a very distinct population compared to those who are not fit for cystectomy, both from a medical oncology point of view but also from a urologic point of view in terms of surgery. So, can you explain a little bit to our listeners why you think that this distinction is critical and why you developed this recommendation especially for this population?

Dr. Ashish Kamat: That is a very important distinction that you made. To build upon what Professor Necchi mentioned earlier, this question that we get from patients after neoadjuvant therapy or systemic therapy is not a new question. It has been something that they have been asking us for the last 20 or 30 years. "Do I really need to have my bladder taken out?" And patients who are especially not fit for surgery will sometimes say, "Do I need to have my bladder taken out? And if I cannot have my bladder taken out, am I going to just not have anything done?" Because the eligibility for radical cystectomy is also a moving target.

Over the years with improvement in surgical technique, improvement in perioperative therapy, ERAS protocols, et cetera, it is really unusual for us to deny a patient the opportunity to have major surgery unless clearly they have very significant comorbid conditions. So I think this endeavor is more broadly encompassing of the patient population than what was evident in previous years.

And I really want to give a shout out to Professor Necchi because what we did was, as part of the International Bladder Cancer Group and Professor Necchi is an integral part of the scientific advisory board, we broached this topic broadly during one of our discussions. And of course, Andrea always does this, he picks on a topic and then he says, "Okay, we need to discuss this really in detail," put together a multinational, multicenter collaborative group, but the driving force was our patients. Because our patients are constantly asking, "Do I need to lose my organ? Do I need to have radiation therapy?" which again, also, has a lot of side effects.

So this was really to answer the question in today's day and age as to do we need to do local consolidation, and if so, in what way? It is not a new question, but we have newer therapies, newer technology, and better ways to answer this. So it is a much needed question that needs to be answered. And I think the distinction between non-surgical candidates and surgical candidates is a little bit blurred in today's day and age.

Dr. Davide Soldato: What about the eligibility, for example, for cisplatin-based chemotherapy? Because I think that that is a very fundamental part of this type of strategy that we apply to patients with muscle-invasive bladder cancer. So we know that there are some caveats for proposing such treatment. And also this population was specifically defined inside this recommendation.

Dr. Andrea Necchi: I think that the focus of our work is just to analyze what is happening after any type of systemic therapy the patient may get neoadjuvantly. So it is not actually a question of treatment eligibility or including cisplatin eligibility. This is an old question of today's practice and clinical trials. But regardless of what the patient received neoadjuvantly, the point that we have addressed in our consensus meeting was what to do next as a further step after systemic therapy or not.

So basically we are- the consensus guidance includes all-comers, so patients to get any type of systemic therapy. So really non-selected based on specific features that determine a special eligibility to a special or a particular therapy. But an all-comer approach is always the winning approach for the translation to be in practice, an all-comer approach just focusing on what has happened after treatment and that we are assessing by the use of conventional imaging, MRI or CT, cystoscopy, urinary cytology, and trying to merge all together this information, all these features in a unique, shared, reliable definition of clinical complete response that could be used as a biomarker for the selection of newer therapies instead of pathological response that has been historically used, and maybe surrogate for the outcome, the long-term outcome and survival of these patients.

Dr. Davide Soldato: A very specific point of the consensus was actually the definition of clinical complete response. As you were saying, this is actually a combination of several parameters including urinary cytology, the use of cross-sectional imaging, for example CT scan, but also the evaluation in cystoscopy of the bladder. Do you foresee any potential problems when applying this type of recommendation, not inside clinical trials, but in the context of routine clinical practice?

Dr. Ashish Kamat: Absolutely. And that was the whole reason we had this consensus meeting. What happens nowadays in daily practice, and we see this every day at our center, we see patients referred to us. This definition or this sort of attempt to define clinical complete response is an ongoing issue. And urologists, medical oncologists, radiation oncologists are always looking to see, does my patient have a complete response? That definition and those paradigms have changed and evolved over the years.

The FDA had a workshop many years ago looking at this very question. And it was to address the proposal that complete clinical response, which is a clinical definition, a clinical state, does this correlate with pathologic response? And with the technology and the systemic therapies we had then, the answer was 'no'. In fact, more patients got recurrent disease than did not get recurrent disease. And that is why, of course in the paper we mention the trials that looked at this question, the trials that evolved around this question.

And I think the distinction between a clinical trial and daily practice is extremely important when we are looking at this definition per se. Because essentially what happens with this issue is that if the patient is not appropriately counseled, and if the physician does not do the appropriate clinical complete response assessment as Professor Necchi mentioned, right, cystoscopy, cytology, imaging, use of markers that are still in evolvement, we risk doing harm to the patient. So we caution in the paper too that this definition is not ready for prime time use. It is something that needs to be studied. It is a rigorous definition and currently we are recommending it for clinical trials. I am sure eventually it will trickle down into clinical practice, but that guidance was not the purpose of this consensus meeting.

Dr. Davide Soldato: There are several parameters that are potentially evolving and could potentially enter inside of clinical practice. For example, you mentioned pelvic MRI and we have now very specific criteria, the VI-RADS criteria, we're able actually to diagnose and also to provide information. So along with these novel imaging techniques, we also know that there are novel biomarkers that could be explored, for example ctDNA and urinary DNA. So what I was wondering is, why were not these included inside the definition that you provide for clinical complete response? And do you think that, as we are designing these trials to potentially spare cystectomy for this patient, we should include these biomarkers very early so that we can actually provide better stratification for our patients and really propose this type of cystectomy-sparing strategy only to those where we are very confident that we have obtained a clinical complete response?

Dr. Andrea Necchi: I would say you have just to wait. So a follow-up is ongoing and hard work is ongoing. At the time we met, at the time we established the meeting in mid-December last year, we had no information on the ctDNA data from major trials, with only a few exceptions. So we were just at the beginning of a story that was more than likely to change but still without numbers and without data from clinical trials. Now in just nine months or 10 months time, we have accumulated important data and newer data will be presented during just a few weeks and a few days regarding the ctDNA, circulating tumor DNA in particular, as a prognostic marker assessed baseline or assessed after neoadjuvant therapy.

So the point is certainly well made and ctDNA is certainly well shaped to be incorporated in a future definition of clinical complete response. But you have to consider the fact that most of the data that we are accumulating related to ctDNA are about the post-cystectomy field or the metastatic field. So regarding neoadjuvant therapy, you know, we have neoadjuvant therapy in the context of bladder-sparing approach, basically we have no information.

And the point that is emerging in our daily practice when using these biomarkers or in clinical trials, and the impression in general, is that it is a very strong biomarker associated with survival, but we absolutely do not know what is the performance of the test in the prediction of superficial bladder relapses, high-grade pTa relapse in the bladder that is left untouched in the patient. We are considering, and maybe it will be just a matter of further discussion, not just what is happening within the immediate endpoint of clinical CR, but also what is happening later with other survival endpoints.

And for example, when looking at the type of events that we may see in this kind of bladder-sparing approaches, most of the events, also in the trials that have been published including the RETAIN study published in JCO, most of the events are related to superficial high-grade superficial non-muscle invasive relapses. So the ability to predict these types of events with ctDNA is completely unknown. Maybe, maybe other liquid biomarkers like urinary tumor DNA, utDNA, could be a bit better shaped in the prediction of this kind of events, you know. But we have still to build the story.

So the question is good. The answer is yes, we will likely, more than likely incorporate liquid biomarkers in the definition, but we have to wait at least more data and more robust data in order to translate this information in routine practice, you know. Another consensus meeting is organized by IBCG and the same folks for November. This meeting will be primarily focused on the liquid biomarkers, the interpretation and use and approval and so of liquid biomarkers including bladder cancer. And we will likely be able to address all these, most of these open issues, so most of these points in the next meetings.

Dr. Davide Soldato: In the consensus you say that probably clinical complete response is now ready to be included in early phase trials, so actually to test what is the efficacy of the regimens that is being evaluated inside of these trials. But you actually do very in-depth work of defining what are the most appropriate endpoints for later phase trials. So to be very specific, the phase three registrational trials that bring new regimens inside of this space. So I just wanted to hear a little bit about what was the definition for event-free survival, which you define as the most appropriate one for this type of trials. And as you were mentioning before, Professor Necchi, there is a very specific interest on the type of events that we observe, especially when we look at these superficial relapses inside of the bladder. So was this a very urgent matter of debate as we define which type of events should actually trigger event-free survival? And did you make a very thoughtful decision about why using this type of endpoint instead of others, for example metastasis-free survival?

Dr. Ashish Kamat: Yeah, this was a matter of intense debate as you might imagine. And again, this is a moving target. So as Professor Necchi mentioned, we tend to partner with each other, our organizations, on having definitions of clinical complete response, biomarker, retreats, and then using that as a marker, and you might imagine this definition of what is appropriate event-free survival, what events matter to the patient, is something we have been talking about for two years. It was not just something that came up at the retreat. But at the retreat there was intense discussion.

One of the things that we talked about was bladder-intact event-free survival because we are trying to spare the patient's bladder. And do we count bladder-intact event-free survival as something that is relevant? The patient advocates absolutely liked that, right? They wanted that. But then we also learned from some of the studies, for example from the RETAIN study, that the non-muscle invasive recurrences can actually lead to metastatic disease. It is not as benign when you have a patient with muscle-invasive bladder cancer that then develops a non-invasive tumor because maybe there is cancer growing underneath the surface that we don't detect when we look in the bladder.

So a lot of those discussions were held, debated. It was a consensus. I have to say it was not 100% agreement on that particular definition, but it was broad consensus. And Andrea, do you want to clarify a little bit as to how we came about that consensus? Because I think this is a very important point we need to make.

Dr. Andrea Necchi: We focused on a bit different definition of BI-EFS, Bladder-Intact Event-Free survival. Just stating EFS as an all-inclusive parameter including all type of high-grade relapse or progression or death that may happen to the patient. So that we were counting high-grade pTa, pT1, CIS relapses to the bladder and of course more deeper involvement in the muscle layer and so, and metastatic disease as a relapse. But the point is that as compared to the classical bladder-intact EFS definition of chemoradiation bladder-sparing approaches that is including muscle-invasive relapses only or death as events, we tried to be as inclusive as possible in order to be as much conservative as possible and to raise as higher the bar as possible for the success.

And this is actually what the patients are asking us. So they are asking, "Okay, I can save my bladder, sparing radical cystectomy, but at which cost?" So in order to provide an answer, we have to be very, very cautious and be on the right shape, on the right position to say, "Okay, we have accomplished the most, the safest points, you know, by which you can proceed with the bladder-sparing." This is the first point.

The other point is related to the MFS, metastasis-free survival that you have mentioned. For sure, it was recognized as a very important point for sure. But in the discussion was clear that our focus was in saving patients, curing the patient, and saving the bladder. Any single event, superficial event that may occur in the bladder-saving approaches of this kind may expose the patient to an extra risk of developing distant metastases, as it happened for example in the RETAIN study. So EFS defined as we have agreed and published, is actually a way of including or anticipating in a safest position the MFS. Because most or if not the entirety of the events of metastasis development in patients undergoing bladder-sparing after neoadjuvant systemic therapy were preceded by a superficial phase of disease relapse, you know.

So I remember very, very few, or we can count just on the finger of one hand, the cases that have been reported in the literature developing de novo metastatic disease in the similar bladder-sparing approaches, in particular when using a maintenance immunotherapy strategy, you know, after they reach TURBT. So this is the reason why with all the limitation that Ashish has mentioned, with all the uncertainties that are still there, the nervousness that is still there, EFS, as defined in the protocol, as put in the paper, is to us at the moment is the safest way to use a primary endpoint in potentially registration trials of this kind with perioperative systemic therapy and response-adapted surgery.

Dr. Ashish Kamat: And David, just to be absolutely clear for our listeners, right, so what was the event-free survival that we defined? Essentially it was a very inclusive definition. Event was defined as high-grade tumor persistence, recurrence, or progression during or after perioperative therapy, and receipt of any additional standard of care treatment including radical cystectomy, radiotherapy or even intravesical therapy. So this was done at the behest of our patient advocates because we really wanted to make a very robust definition that could be utilized appropriately as an adequate primary endpoint for both early and late phase bladder preservation trials.

Dr. Davide Soldato: I think that it really highlights one of the points that I liked the most about this consensus is that it really incorporated the patient vision and a sort of shared decision making process when we are deciding how we want to design these trials that will explore this bladder-sparing surgery.

And Professor Necchi mentioned something that I think will be also a very interesting question for trials that will be developed considering the activity of this combination that we are seeing right now, which is maintenance. Because right now our approach in the few cases where patients do not do any type of treatments after an induction with neoadjuvant treatments is basically represented by observation. So I was wondering if you think that the field will actually evolve to a sort of maintenance strategy even in patients that will achieve a complete clinical response?

Dr. Andrea Necchi: We just mentioned briefly in the paper, this is a very important point that was touched during the discussion, and in particular was raised and discussed by FDA people participating in the meeting. And when looking at the data from the trials that were available and are still available thus far, we could provide a suggestion that maintenance immune therapy is the preferred approach in this kind of approach as it currently stands, as the data currently stand. Because the cleanest data towards the successful part of this journey is related to the studies that provided a kind of maintenance therapy, like the study with nivolumab or the RETAIN-2 study with maintenance immune therapy instead of RETAIN study that was just stopping treatment until surgery with MVAC chemotherapy.

So in general the impression is that maintenance therapy may help in reducing the type of events, including the events that we incorporate in the EFS definition that we mentioned in the paper. The point that you mentioned is very important because on the other side we have a problem, a big problem of affordability and cost of the treatment. The de-escalation trials are an urgent need and represent a call for the studies. Unfortunately, as you mentioned, this is something that moves beyond the possibilities of this type of consensus because we don't have data and we have to accumulate data from clinical trials prior to saying, "Okay, certain patients could de-escalate therapy and stop therapy and some other not." So we are still at the very beginning. So we can do- we can discuss about this in the radical cystectomy paradigm but not in the bladder-sparing paradigm, you know. But this is for sure a point, a discussion point that will be taken, pretty well taken in one year or two year projection.

Dr. Davide Soldato: I was wondering if in the consensus, considering that patient advocates and patient associations were also involved, did you decide to actually suggest the inclusion of patient-reported outcomes or the evaluation of shared decision-making in the development of this trial really as endpoints that should matter as much or as much as possible as event-free survival and clinical complete response?

Dr. Ashish Kamat: Oh yeah, absolutely. We had patient advocates, we had the World Bladder Cancer Patient Coalition, Bladder Cancer Advocacy Network, patient representatives. And we always consider this. Shared decision-making is actually the impetus behind why these efforts have been launched, right? So it is the shared decision-making that is very, very important. It is the driving force behind what we do. And it is worth noting, for example, for the design of such studies, regulatory agencies consider response-based endpoints or overall survival as primary endpoints. But the patient advocates consider quality of life to be just as important, if not more important sometimes than overall survival numbers. Because patient advocates will say, "Well if I live longer but I'm miserable living longer, yes that works for regulatory agencies but doesn't work for us." So PROs clearly are very, very important. And, in fact, we just literally had a meeting in Houston, the IBCG meeting where PROs were a main point of what we discussed. So incorporating PROs in everything we do, not just this but everything we do, Dr. Necchi, myself, everybody involved in these fields realizes it is very, very important. So absolutely.

Dr. Davide Soldato: I want to thank again Professor Necchi and Professor Kamat for joining us today.

Dr. Andrea Necchi: Thank you.

Dr. Ashish Kamat: It is our pleasure.

Dr. Davide Soldato: Thanks again and we appreciate you sharing more on your JCO article titled "Endpoints for the Next Generation Bladder-Sparing Perioperative Trials for Patients with Muscle-Invasive Bladder Cancer."

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JCO Editor-in-Chief Dr. Jonathan Friedberg is joined by colleagues Dr. Jennifer Woyach, Dr. Wojciech Jurczak, and Dr. Matthew Davids to discuss simultaneous publications presented at ASH 2025 on pertibrutinib, a new upfront treatment option for patients with chronic lymphocytic leukemia.

TRANSCRIPT

The disclosures for guests on this podcast can be found in the show notes.

Dr. Jonathan Friedberg: I'm Jonathan Friedberg, editor of Journal of Clinical Oncology, and welcome to JCO After Hours, where we are covering two manuscripts that were presented at the American Society of Hematology meeting 2025 in Orlando, Florida. I am delighted to be joined by colleagues on this call to discuss these pivotal manuscripts which cover the topic of pirtobrutinib, a new upfront treatment option for patients with chronic lymphocytic leukemia.

I will first just introduce our guests, Dr. Woyach.

Dr. Jennifer Woyach: Hi, my name is Jennifer Woyach. I am from the Ohio State University.

Dr. Wojciech Jurczak: Hello, I am Wojciech Jurczak, working at the National Research Institute of Oncology in Krakow, Poland.

Dr. Matthew Davids: Hi, I am Matthew Davids from Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston.

Dr. Jonathan Friedberg: We are going to start by just learning a little bit about these two trials that were both large, randomized phase 3 studies that I think answered some definitive questions. We will start with your study, Jennifer. If you could just describe the design of your study and the patient population.

Dr. Jennifer Woyach: Absolutely. So this is the BRUIN CLL-314 study, and this is a phase 3 randomized trial of pirtobrutinib versus ibrutinib in patients with CLL or SLL who had not previously been treated with a covalent BTK inhibitor. The patients were both treatment-naive and relapsed/refractory, about one-third of the patients treatment-naive, the rest relapsed/refractory, and they were stratified based upon 17p deletion and the number of prior lines of therapy.

The primary objective was looking at non-inferiority of overall response rate over the entire treated population as well as the relapsed/refractory patient population. Key secondary objectives included progression-free survival in the intention-to-treat and the smaller relapsed/refractory and treatment-naive populations.

Dr. Jonathan Friedberg: And just comment a little bit on the risk of the patients.

Dr. Jennifer Woyach: This study was fairly typical of this cohort of patients. Within the relapsed/refractory patient population, there was a median of one prior line of therapy in each of the groups, up to nine prior lines of therapy in the patients included on the study. For the overall cohort, about two-thirds of the patients were IGHV unmutated, about 15% had 17p deletion, 30% had TP53 mutations, and about 35% to 40% had a complex karyotype, which is three or more abnormalities.

Dr. Jonathan Friedberg: And what were your findings?

Dr. Jennifer Woyach: Regarding the primary outcome, which is the focus of the publication, we did find that pirtobrutinib was indeed non-inferior and actually superior to ibrutinib for overall response rate throughout the entire patient population and in both the relapsed/refractory and treatment-naive cohorts. PFS is a little bit immature at this time but is trending towards also being significantly better in pirtobrutinib-treated patients compared with ibrutinib-treated patients. Probably most significantly, we found this to be the case in the treatment-naive cohort where there was a striking trend to an advantage of pirtobrutinib versus ibrutinib.

Dr. Jonathan Friedberg: And the follow-up that you have on that progression-free survival?

Dr. Jennifer Woyach: So we have about 18 months follow-up on progression-free survival.

Dr. Jonathan Friedberg: The second study, Wojciech, can you just go through the design and patient population that you treated?

Dr. Wojciech Jurczak: Thank you, Dr. Friedberg, for this question. So the BRUIN CLL-313 study was, in fact, the first phase 3 study with pirtobrutinib in exclusively untreated CLL patients. It was a randomized study where we challenged pirtobrutinib versus bendamustine-rituximab. At the time we designed the protocol, bendamustine-rituximab was an option as a standard of care, and Bruton tyrosine kinase monotherapy was used far more commonly than nowadays.

The primary target of the study was progression-free survival. We took all untreated patients except for those with 17p deletions. Therefore, it is a good representation for intermediate risk. We had about 60% of the population, 56 to be precise, which was unmutated, evenly distributed into two treatment arms. 17p deleted cases were excluded, but we had about 7% and 8% of TP53 mutated patients as well as about 11% and 7%, respectively, in the pirtobrutinib and bendamustine-rituximab arm of patients with complex karyotype.

The progression-free survival was in favor of pirtobrutinib and was assessed by an independent review committee. What is important is that the progression-free survival of the bendamustine-rituximab arm was actually similar to the other studies addressing the same questions, like the comparison with ibrutinib in the ALLIANCE study or zanubrutinib in the SEQUOIA study. What was different was the hazard ratio. In our study, it was 0.20. It was one of the longest effect sizes noted in the frontline BTK study. It represented an 80% reduction in progression-free survival or death. If we compare it to ibrutinib or zanubrutinib, it was 0.39 and 0.42 respectively.

Presumably, this great effect contributed towards a trend of overall survival difference. Although survival data are not mature enough, there is a clear trend represented by three patients we lost in the pirtobrutinib arm versus 10 patients lost in the bendamustine-rituximab arm. This trend in overall survival is becoming statistically significant despite the fact that there was a possibility of crossover, and effectively 52.9 patients, which means 18 out of 34 patients relapsing in the bendamustine-rituximab arm, were treated by pirtobrutinib.

Dr. Jonathan Friedberg: I am going to turn it over to Matt. The question is: why study pirtobrutinib in this patient population? And then with these two studies, how do you find the patients that were treated, are they representative of people who you see? And do you see this maybe being approved and more widely available?

Dr. Matthew Davids: I think in terms of the first question, why study this in a frontline population, we have seen very impressive data with pirtobrutinib in a very difficult-to-treat population of CLL patients. This was from the original BRUIN phase 1/2 study where most of the patients had at least two or three lines of therapy, often both a covalent BTK inhibitor and the BCL2 inhibitor venetoclax, and yet they were still responding to pirtobrutinib. The drug was also very well tolerated in that early phase experience. And actually, we have seen phase 3 data from the BRUIN 321 study comparing pirtobrutinib to bendamustine and rituximab in a relapse population as well. So I think that really motivated these studies to look at pirtobrutinib as a first therapy. You know, often in other cancers of course, we want to use our best therapy first, and I think these studies are an initial step at looking at that.

In terms of the second question around the patient population, these are pretty representative patient populations, I would say, for most frontline CLL studies. We see patients who are a bit younger and fitter than sort of the general population of CLL patients who are treated in clinical practice, and I think that is true here as well. Median age in the sort of mid-60s here is a bit younger than the typical patients we are treating in practice. But that is not different from other CLL frontline studies that we have seen recently, so I think it makes it a little bit easier as we kind of think across studies to feel comfortable that these are relatively similar populations.

Dr. Jonathan Friedberg: How do you see this either getting regulatory approval or potentially being used compared to current standard of care options?

Dr. Matthew Davids: So my understanding is that both of these trials were designed with registrational intent in the frontline setting, and they are both positive studies. That is certainly very encouraging in terms of the potential for an approval here. We have seen in terms of the FDA recently some concerns around the proportion of patients who are coming from North America, and my understanding is that is relatively low on these two studies. But nonetheless, the datasets are very impressive, and so I think it is certainly supportive of regulatory approval for frontline pirtobrutinib.

Dr. Jonathan Friedberg: I will ask Jennifer a question. The control arm in your study was ibrutinib, and I think many in the audience may recognize that newer, second-generation BTK inhibitors like acalabrutinib and zanubrutinib are more frequently used now if monotherapy is decided. How do you respond to that, and how would you put your results in your pirtobrutinib arm in context with what has been observed with those agents?

Dr. Jennifer Woyach: Yeah, that is a great question. Even though in the United States we are predominantly using acalabrutinib or zanubrutinib when choosing a monotherapy BTK inhibitor, this is actually not the case throughout the entire world where ibrutinib is still used very frequently. The head-to-head studies of both acalabrutinib and zanubrutinib compared to ibrutinib have shown us pretty well what the safety profile and efficacy profile of the second-generation BTK inhibitors is.

So even though we do not have a head-to-head study of acalabrutinib or zanubrutinib versus pirtobrutinib, I think, given the entirety of data that we have with all of the covalent BTK inhibitors, I think we can safely look at the pirtobrutinib arm here, how the ibrutinib arm compares or performs in context with those other clinical trials. And though we really can not say anything about pirtobrutinib versus acalabrutinib or zanubrutinib, I think we can still get a good idea of what might be the clinical scenarios in which you might want to choose pirtobrutinib.

Dr. Jonathan Friedberg: And Wojciech, do you agree with that? Obviously, I think you have acknowledged that chemoimmunotherapy is rarely used anymore as part of upfront treatment for CLL. So, I guess a similar question. If you were to put the pirtobrutinib result in your study in context with, I guess, more contemporary type controls, would you agree that it is competitive?

Dr. Wojciech Jurczak: Well, I think that that was the last study ever where bendamustine-rituximab was used as a comparator arm. So we should notice that smashing difference. Because if we look at the progression-free survival at two years, we have 93.4% in pirtobrutinib arm versus 70.7% in bendamustine-rituximab arm. Bendamustine-rituximab arm did the same as in the other trials, like ALLIANCE or SEQUOIA. Pirtobrutinib did exceptionally well, as pirto is not just the very best BTK inhibitor overcoming the resistance, but perhaps even more important for the first line, it is very well tolerated and is a very selective drug.

Now, if we look at treatment-related adverse events, the discontinuation rate, they were hardly ever seen. If we compared the adverse events in exposure-adjusted incidence, literally all adverse events were two or three times higher in bendamustine-rituximab arm except for the bleeding tendency, which however was predominantly in CTCAE grade 1 and 2 with just 0.7% of grade 3 hemorrhage. Therefore, I think that we should actually put the best and the safest drugs upfront if we may, and pirtobrutinib is, or should be, the first choice if we choose monotherapy.

Now, I understand that we are not presenting you the data of pirtobrutinib in combination with anti-CD20 or with BCL2 inhibitors, but that is to come.

Dr. Jonathan Friedberg: Matt, how would you envision, were regulatory approval granted and this were an option, using this in the upfront patient population? Is there anybody who you would preferentially use this or start on this treatment? Or would this be something that you would tend to reserve for second line?

Dr. Matthew Davids: So I would say that in general for most of my patients who would want to start with a continuous BTK inhibitor, I would still use a covalent BTK inhibitor, and I say that for a couple of reasons despite the very promising data from these studies. The first is that the follow-up for both of these phase 3 trials is still quite short, in the range of a median 18 to 24 months. And we know that CLL is a marathon, not a sprint, and these patients are going to probably be living for a very long time. And we do have much longer follow-up from the covalent BTK inhibitors, median of 10-year follow-up with ibrutinib and five to six years with zanubrutinib and acalabrutinib respectively. And you know, I do not think that the pirtobrutinib is going to fall off a cliff after two years, but on the other hand, I think there is a lot of value to long-term data in this disease, and that is why I think for most of my patients I would stick with covalent BTK inhibitors.

But the other important factor that we need to consider is patients who are younger and may have many different CLL treatments over the years. We have to be very careful, I think, about how we sequence these drugs. We know right now that we can start with covalent BTK inhibitors and then subsequently patients will respond well to the non-covalent inhibitor pirtobrutinib in later lines of therapy. But right now we do not have prospective data the other way around. So how will the patients on these studies who progress on pirtobrutinib respond to covalent BTK inhibitors? We do not know yet. There have not been a lot of progression events, which is great, but we would like to see some data in that respect to feel more comfortable with that sequence.

Now, I do think that particularly for older patients and those who have significant cardiovascular comorbidities, if they wanted to go on a continuous BTK inhibitor, I do think these data really strongly support using pirtobrutinib as the BTK inhibitor of choice in that population. In particular, the cardiovascular risks with pirtobrutinib seem to be quite low. I was very struck in the comparison with BR that the rate of AFib was equivalent between the two arms of the study. And that is really the first time we have seen that with any of these BTK inhibitors, no elevated risk of AFib in a randomized study. I think that is the population where it will get the most traction first, is the upfront, sort of older patient with significant cardiovascular comorbidities. And as the data from these studies mature, I think that we will start to see more widespread use of pirtobrutinib in the frontline setting.

Dr. Jonathan Friedberg: Jennifer, I am just curious if you have any personal experience or heard anecdotally about after progression on pirtobrutinib the use of other BTK inhibitors and whether there is a growing experience there.

Dr. Jennifer Woyach: I do not think that there is much clinical experience, you know, as Matt alluded to, it certainly has not been tested yet. There has been some data in relapsed CLL suggesting that in people who have resistance mutations to covalent BTK inhibitors after treatment with pirtobrutinib, sometimes those mutations go away. I think most of us are concerned that they are probably not actually gone but maybe in compartments that we just have not sampled, suggesting that sort of approach where you might sequence a covalent inhibitor after a non-covalent in somebody who had already been resistant probably would not work that well.

But, you know, in this setting where people had never been exposed to a covalent BTK inhibitor before, we really have no idea what the resistance patterns are going to be like. We assume they will be the same as what we have seen in relapsed CLL, but I think we just need some longer follow-up to know for sure.

Dr. Wojciech Jurczak: If I may confront Dr. Davids about the use of covalent BTK inhibitors upfront, well, I think that we should abandon the idea of using the first and the second and the third generation, at least if we don't have medical lines. If we endlessly block the same pathway, it is not going to be effective. So if pirtobrutinib gets approval in first, second line, we do not necessarily have to use it in the first line. I am not here in a position to defend that we should treat patients with pirtobrutinib upfront and not BCL2 time-limited regimen.

However, the way I look at CLL patients when choosing therapy is not just how should I treat them now, but what would be the best regimen in 5, 10 years if I have to re-treat them. And in some instances, the idea may be that in this setting we would like to have a BTK inhibitor upfront to have a BCL2 inhibitor later to make it time-limited. Although I understand and I agree with Matthew that if we have an elderly, fragile population, then the charm of having a drug taken once a day in a tablet with literally few cardiovascular adverse events might be an option.

Dr. Jonathan Friedberg: And I will give Matt the last word whether he wants to respond to that, and also just as a forward-looking issue, I know both investigators have implied that there will be future studies looking at combinations with pirtobrutinib, and if you have any sense as to what you would be looking for there.

Dr. Matthew Davids: The field really is heading toward time-limited therapy for most patients, I would say. There is a bit of a discrepancy right now in the field between sort of what we are doing in academic practice and what is done sort of more widely in community practice. And so right now we are going to see evolving datasets comparing these approaches. We are already seeing data now from the CLL17 study with ibrutinib comparing continuous to time-limited venetoclax-based therapy, and we are seeing similar efficacy benefits from these time-limited therapies without the need for continuous treatment. And so that is where I think some of the future studies with pirtobrutinib combining it with venetoclax and other partners are so important. Fortunately, several of these studies are already ongoing, including a phase 3 trial called CLL18, which is looking at pirtobrutinib with venetoclax, comparing that to venetoclax and obinutuzumab. So I am optimistic that we are going to be developing these very robust datasets where we can actually use pirtobrutinib in the frontline setting as a time-limited therapy as a component of a multi-drug regimen. So far, those early data are very promising.

Dr. Wojciech Jurczak: Perhaps last but not least, in a single center we have treated over 300 patients with pirtobrutinib. So eventually some of them relapsed. And I must say that our experience on BCL2 inhibitors, not just venetoclax but including sonrotoclax, are appealingly good. Therefore, by using pirtobrutinib even earlier, we do not block the efficacy of other compounds.

Dr. Jonathan Friedberg: All right.

Well, I want to thank all of our speakers. I also want to congratulate our two guests who presented these very influential papers at the ASH Annual Meeting, and chose to publish them in JCO, so we thank you for that, and Dr. Davids for your commentary - really appreciated.

That is this episode of JCO After Hours. Thank you for your attention.

The purpose of this podcast is to educate and to inform. This is not a substitute for professional medical care and is not intended for use in the diagnosis or treatment of individual conditions.

Guests on this podcast express their own opinions, experience, and conclusions. Guest statements on the podcast do not express the opinions of ASCO. The mention of any product, service, organization, activity, or therapy should not be construed as an ASCO endorsement.

Disclosures

Dr. Wojciech Jurczak

Consulting or Advisory Role: BeiGene, Lilly, Abbvie/Genentech, Takeda, Roche, AstraZeneca

Research Funding: Roche, Takeda, Janssen-Cilag, BeiGene, AstraZeneca, Lilly, Abbvie/Genentech

Dr. Jennifer Woyach

Consulting or Advisory Role: Pharmacyclics, Janssen, AstraZeneca, Beigene, Loxo, Newave Pharmaceutical, Genentech, Abbvie, Merck

Research Funding: Company name: Janssen, Schrodinger, beone, Abbvie, Merck, Loxo/Lilly

Dr. Matthew Davids

Honoraria: Curio Science, Aptitude Health, Bio Ascend, PlatformQ Health, Plexus

Consulting or Advisory Role: Genentech, Janssen, Abbvie, AstraZeneca, Adaptive Biotechnologies, Ascentage Pharma, BeiGene, Lilly, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Genmab, Merck, MEI Pharma, Nuvalent, Inc., Galapagos NV, Schroedinger

Research Funding: Ascentage Pharma, Novartis, MEI Pharma, AstraZeneca

JCO Editorial Fellow Peter Li and author Dr. Jahanzaib Khwaja discuss the ASH 2025 Simultaneous Publication article, "A New Validated Staging System for AL Amyloidosis With Stage lllC Defining Ultra-Poor Risk: AL International Staging System."

TRANSCRIPT

The disclosures for guests on this podcast can be found in the show notes.

Dr. Peter Li: Welcome to this episode of JCO Article Insights. I am Dr. Peter Li, JCO's Editorial Fellow, and today, I am joined by Dr. Jahanzaib Khwaja on a new validated staging system on AL amyloidosis with stage lllC defining ultra-poor risk, AL International Staging System. This is a simultaneous publication that will be presented at this year's ASH Conference.

At the time of this recording, our guest has disclosures that will be linked in the transcript.

So, Dr. Khwaja, let's start off first: What would you say is the significance of your study?

Dr. Jahanzaib Khwaja: Thank you very much. This is an important study in that, in the current treatment era, we have really improved outcomes of patients with systemic AL amyloidosis. Traditionally, the staging systems that have been employed, which are the Mayo 2012 and the European modification 2016, have been founded in eras where there were historic treatment protocols.

So the significance of this new staging system is looking at outcomes of patients in the modern treatment era. That is patients who are treated with daratumumab-based treatments in the first line. And this is kind of the largest study which is externally validating a new prognostic model in the current treatment era with modern outcomes.

Dr. Peter Li: Can you tell our listeners what is different about your new staging system?

Dr. Jahanzaib Khwaja: The traditional staging systems, the Mayo 2012 and the European modification of 2016, looked at outcomes of patients with systemic AL amyloidosis with historic treatment protocols. And we know that they looked at outcomes according to an NT-proBNP and troponin, and in the Mayo 2012, they looked at it with the addition of the dFLC, which is the difference in the involved and uninvolved free light chain.

Over the years, we have seen that outcomes have improved, and over decades, actually, outcomes are much better when we compare them to the previous decade. If we look at current treatment approaches, those traditional staging systems inadequately determine the poorest prognostic risk. So they are unable to tell us those who are going to perform poorly.

Our current new validated staging system looks at the traditional NT-proBNP and troponin but uses the addition of the longitudinal strain. This is an echocardiographic parameter, and it is used widely in treatment centers who treat amyloidosis. This really identifies those ultra-high risk patients, and these are the patients who will perform poorly in current treatment protocols.

And why is that important? Well, we need a robust staging system in the current treatment era which can stratify patients who will do well but also stratify those patients who do not do well. Because that is important for counseling patients, for risk stratification, for treatment approaches, and in the future, for designing clinical trials.

Dr. Peter Li: And that is referring to the longitudinal strain greater than -9% and NT-proBNP greater than 8,500 and then the high-sensitivity troponins greater than 50, which will define the new staging system. Can you talk more about how you picked these cutoffs and also what that alludes to in terms of the outcomes that you have discovered in this age of daratumumab-based therapy?

Dr. Jahanzaib Khwaja: Yeah, that is a really excellent question because we have aimed to build upon traditional staging systems. So clinicians have used these traditional models for many, many years, and they have robustly underpinned our stratification of patients and how we counsel patients. So we didn't want to change some of these well-established thresholds, but we wanted to test them in the current treatment era. So the NT-proBNP of 8,500 and the high-sensitivity troponin of 50 were the traditionally used thresholds. And they actually stand the test of time.

But we found that longitudinal strain additionally and independently predicts outcome independent of these other biomarkers. It is independent actually as a continuous variable, so you can cut this at a number of different stratification points and find independence. But we wanted to determine and discriminate those with the poorest outcomes. So we validated a longitudinal strain threshold of greater than -9% by deriving this from a dataset of patients with the traditionally highest risk. Those are with European stage lllB. And looked at the optimal threshold with time-dependent ROC analysis.

So we did this in our derivation cohort and then validated this externally in our external validation cohort amongst a number of centers in Europe, in the US, and in the UK. And it is important to note because longitudinal strain is an echocardiographic parameter, and traditionally the limitations are considered to be inter-vendor and inter-operator variability and intra-operator variability, and there are challenges with reproducibility of some of these measurements. So that is often cited as a limitation. But we found, when we have externally validated this across different centers using different platforms, actually the threshold of -9% is independently predictive of poorer outcomes independent of the traditional NT-proBNP and troponin thresholds, and it is robustly predictive of poorest outcomes.

We know that those with stage lllC have a median overall survival of 4 to 7 months in the modern treatment era. And if we sub-stratify these by patients treated with daratumumab, outcomes have improved, but still, even if we look at daratumumab-treated patients, one-year overall survival is still only around 50 percent. So these are a poor risk group in the modern treatment era.

Dr. Peter Li: Which kind of makes sense in a way because this kind of predicts whether they have amyloid-related cardiomyopathy. So I think this all tracks with our listeners. But given the poor outcomes even with daratumumab-based therapies, do you think this new staging system would change practice, if at all?

Dr. Jahanzaib Khwaja: Yeah, I think that is a really good point because I think it comes to the question of why we use a staging system. What are its applications? I think one of the key things we think about in the clinic is how do we counsel patients when we first talk to them about their diagnosis. So there is a lot of information, but predominantly people want to know, what is my outlook going to look like?

And as I say, in the bortezomib treatment era, 2010 to 2020, we used to say you have stage lllB, you have very poor outcomes, median survival maybe around six months. We have shown here that actually those with lllB have much better outcomes definitely over 12 months, up to 24 months in those with daratumumab-based therapies. So we need to counsel them in a different way.

We then also need to say, "Well, who are the ultra-high risk?" So we said those with the longitudinal strain of greater than -9% with the traditional NT-proBNP and troponin cutoffs. And those patients will have poor outcomes. We need to talk about palliation. We need to talk about alternate treatment approaches.

And then importantly for the community is about treatment and clinical trial design. So again, traditionally the traditional high-risk group lllB used to be considered an exclusion for all major trials. So these were excluded in the ANDROMEDA study, which led to the approval of daratumumab-based therapy, and multiple other trials. And we show here that actually patients with lllB should not be excluded from these studies because they do have good outcomes.

And I think we make the important point that those with lllC, who do have poor outcomes, they need a different treatment approach, and we need to think about stratifying these patients differently. So perhaps the next modality of treatment will be the anti-fibril antibodies or a mode of treatment which can clear antibodies or clear the amyloid fibrils from the organs and reduce the organ toxicity early on.

We know that those with lllC have poor outcomes particularly within the first year, and organ dysfunction really predominates here. So a different treatment approach is required, and we need to design trials specifically for these patients which look beyond anti-plasma cell clone therapy but also look at clearing the amyloid fibrils and improving organ function as this is predominantly the cause of death in these patients.

Dr. Peter Li: That's an excellent point right there.

Do you foresee any limitations to this new staging system, or can you comment on is there potentially a better way to refine this staging criteria in the future?

Dr. Jahanzaib Khwaja: Yeah, I think that is a really excellent point to consider, that staging systems always need refining across treatment eras. So we have looked at the bortezomib era, and then we have validated this in the daratumumab-based era. We know that amongst different countries access to treatment varies. We know that there are a number of factors which determine your health-related outcomes. That's access to healthcare, speed of diagnosis, access to tertiary diagnostics, ability to biopsy, and then supportive care.

And I think our staging system highlights the importance of organ dysfunction predominantly causing death early on. And I think that as treatments improve this should be refined. So the expectation I think is, as we have better anti-plasma cell directed therapies, and as we hopefully develop anti-fibril antibodies and anti-fibril clearance drugs, that we will need to revalidate new models to effectively prognosticate in this treatment era.

And I also think that as we become a bit more sophisticated with our approaches, we know that this can be refined in the future looking at other prognostic factors with regards to healthcare outcomes. I would say one of the strengths, however, of this model is that it builds on the traditional model, and it's quite simple to use. You just have the NT-proBNP and the troponin, and then longitudinal strain, which is used quite frequently in amyloid centers, and an echocardiogram is used in essentially all patients for diagnosis. So I think it will certainly be quite practical.

But certainly I think, as you say, as treatment approaches change over time, and as we have further options in the future, we will need to refine prognostication.

Dr. Peter Li: For the listeners out there, let's say someone comes in our clinic and we diagnose them with stage lllC amyloidosis. Can you comment on what clinical trials are out there that potentially they can refer their patients to? You mentioned anti-fibril therapy, which I think would be the way of the future. Can you kind of comment what you know at this current stage and point listeners in the right direction?

Dr. Jahanzaib Khwaja: This is the challenge in amyloidosis. We don't have specific trials that are looking at those with the highest risk. And at present, even the ISA International Guidelines talk about risk according to the old treatment approaches and discuss attenuating our current chemotherapy approaches. And I think that for clinicians out there who identify those at the highest risk, it is really important to have a multidisciplinary approach, to consider palliation and palliative services early, and really work with your fellow cardiologists and renal physicians and neurologists to enable the best supportive care you have in order to deliver this anti-plasma cell directed therapy.

We know that actually you only need for most patients small amounts of doses of chemotherapy to get good clonal responses, and we have seen that even in the bortezomib era that actually they have good CR rates and more impressive CR rates with daratumumab. But because of the organ dysfunction, it can be really challenging to deliver these doses. And supportive care is going to be really important particularly for these challenging patients.

The future will be designing clinical trials that are appropriate for these patients. At present, we currently don't have available options, but I think the more we gather this data, the more we work collaboratively as a community, we will be able to mobilize our resources and get the best outcomes for these patients.

Dr. Peter Li: First build the field of dreams and then hopefully more therapies will arrive in the future.

Thank you so much, Dr. Khwaja, for speaking about the JCO article, "A New Validated Staging System for AL Amyloidosis With Stage lllC Defining Ultra-Poor Risk: AL International Staging System," and for all your valuable input today.

Dr. Jahanzaib Khwaja: Thank you very much.

Dr. Peter Li: Make sure to check out the presentation at this year's ASH Conference taking place from December 6 to December 9. Thank you for listening to JCO Article Insights. Please come back for more interviews and article summaries and be sure to leave us a rating and review so others can find our show. For more podcasts and episodes from ASCO, please visit asco.org/podcast.

The purpose of this podcast is to educate and to inform. This is not a substitute for professional medical care and is not intended for use in the diagnosis or treatment of individual conditions.

Guests on this podcast express their own opinions, experience, and conclusions. Guest statements on the podcast do not express the opinions of ASCO. The mention of any product, service, organization, activity, or therapy should not be construed as an ASCO endorsement.

In this episode of JCO Article Insights, host Dr. Ece Cali Daylan interviews author Dr. Jeffrey Bradley about the article, "Simultaneous Durvalumab and Chemoradiotherapy in Unresectable Stage III Non–Small Cell Lung Cancer" by Bradley, et al published October 13, 2025.

TRANSCRIPT

Dr. Ece Cali: Welcome to this episode of JCO Article Insights. This is Dr. Ece Cali, JCO Editorial Fellow. Today I'm joined by Dr. Jeffrey Bradley, Professor of Radiation Oncology at the University of Pennsylvania, to discuss the manuscript, "Simultaneous Durvalumab and Platinum-Based Chemoradiotherapy in Unresectable Stage III Non-Small-Cell Lung Cancer: The Phase III PACIFIC-2 Study."

The PACIFIC-2 study was a phase III, double-blind, randomized trial comparing the efficacy and safety of simultaneous durvalumab with concurrent chemoradiation followed by consolidation durvalumab to the concurrent chemoradiation followed by placebo in patients with unresectable stage III non-small cell lung cancer. The primary endpoint was progression-free survival by blinded independent central review. The secondary endpoints were overall response rate, overall survival, and safety.

Three hundred twenty-eight patients were randomized 2:1 to durvalumab and placebo, respectively. Unfortunately, this trial did not meet its primary endpoint. There were no statistically significant differences in PFS or OS. The frequency of adverse events was similar between the two arms. Grade 3 or higher adverse events were observed in 53% of the patients in the durvalumab arm compared to 59% of the patients in the placebo arm. Of note, the frequency of pneumonitis was similar in the two arms. Approximately 28% of patients in each arm developed pneumonitis, and about 5% of the pneumonitis observed in each arm was grade 3 or higher in severity. Treatment discontinuation rates secondary to the adverse events were higher in the durvalumab arm, 25% compared to 12%. Adverse events leading to treatment discontinuation and death were more frequently seen in the durvalumab arm during the first four months of the treatment, which corresponds to the simultaneous administration of chemoradiation and durvalumab.

Dr. Bradley, before we delve into the results, can you please explain the rationale for this study design and how this concept fits into the current treatment landscape?

Dr. Jeffrey Bradley: Yeah, this trial came on the heels of PACIFIC after there was a progression-free survival benefit showed in PACIFIC that in the locally advanced unresectable population that consolidation immunotherapy, in this case durvalumab, had a progression-free survival benefit. A number of us in the clinical trial space thought to add concurrent immunotherapy in addition to consolidation immunotherapy that that would also improve outcomes for patients. So a number of trials were launched to follow up of PACIFIC.

In this case, this is a phase III trial where the control arm was placebo. There was no overall survival results yet from PACIFIC, just a PFS benefit, and a number of countries across the world had not approved maintenance durvalumab in this space. So this trial looked at the experimental arm, which was concurrent immunotherapy, durvalumab, and chemoradiation followed by consolidation durvalumab versus placebo.

Dr. Ece Cali: And if we were to focus on the safety profile first, an increased pneumonitis risk was a theoretical concern when immunotherapy is given concurrently with radiation. Do we see any major differences in the safety profile between the two arms in this trial?

Dr. Jeffrey Bradley: No, and we were concerned about the addition of concurrent immunotherapy and chemoradiation, like you said, towards concern about increased pneumonitis rate, but we did not see increased pneumonitis in the experimental arm over placebo. And the grade 3 or higher, as you said, it was roughly 5%, more or less, in both arms, so we didn't see increase in pneumonitis toxicity with concurrent IO and chemoradiation.

Dr. Ece Cali: But interestingly though, despite the lack of significantly increased toxicity with durvalumab, unfortunately, administering immunotherapy simultaneously with chemoradiation therapy did not improve survival. Lack of superiority of this treatment regimen, as you mentioned, is further confirmed across multiple similar negative trial readouts such as ECOG-ACRIN 5181 and CheckMate 73L. Dr. Bradley, in your view, what are some potential explanations for why this strategy did not pan out in clinical trials?

Dr. Jeffrey Bradley: Regarding toxicity, let me go back and point out that we did see an increased number of immune-mediated adverse events. It was 34.7% in the concurrent immunotherapy arm versus 15.7% in the placebo arm. So that led to a higher number of discontinuations of immunotherapy which I think probably had an effect. So we didn't... there was an increased pneumonitis toxicity, but there were expected immune-mediated toxicities that caused people to stop giving immunotherapy. You can see that in the PFS curves. They were, you know, they crossed over after like a month, but initially there was lower PFS for the experimental arm, and then the experimental arm got better after we divided into four months, before four months and after four months.

Dr. Ece Cali: For one reason or another, it looks like the simultaneous administration did not really improve outcomes. We now know that simultaneously giving them another concurrent radiation should really no longer be pursued in clinical trials for this patient population. Can you share with our audience what strategies are being studied in this setting and what trials to watch out for in the future?

Dr. Jeffrey Bradley: Sure, I think when you add concurrent radiation to immunotherapy, there were more central tumors in this trial, I think you're killing lymphocytes and negating the effect of immunotherapy. So I think that's the smoking gun for this trial, for the ECOG trial, for the small cell trial that NRG reported, LU005, and other trials. So correct, I don't think there's any need to continue to pursue concurrent immunotherapy in this space of lung cancer.

But that's not to say there aren't many other trials that are either ongoing, have accrued and awaiting results, or being planned for the next phase of clinical trials. We have a trial within NRG Oncology called NRG-LU008. It's a randomized phase III trial that is using an SBRT boost to a peripheral primary and chemoradiation to the nodes, because the primary tumor is the one that fails more often than the lymph nodes, and that's compared to PACIFIC in the control arm.

PACIFIC-9 is another trial in the same line as the other PACIFIC trials. That one is using dual checkpoint inhibition versus the control arm being PACIFIC. So there are three arms in that trial, durva and oleclumab, durva and monalizumab versus the PACIFIC arm. And that trial is completed accrual, but we have no results from that study yet.

Johnson & Johnson has a trial open looking at a nanoparticle. That's a radiosensitizer where bronchoscopy is used to inject the primary tumor and the lymph nodes with a radiosensitizer. That's a randomized phase ll trial that's ongoing. It's got three arms, two different doses of this radiosensitizing drug and then a control arm without injection at all. The control arm is again the PACIFIC arm.

And then those of us within the NCI-based clinical trials evaluation program, CTEP, are proposing an intergroup trial that would compare induction chemo-immunotherapy followed by chemoradiation followed by maintenance immunotherapy versus PACIFIC in a phase III study. So I think there's other trials that are either completed, ongoing completed, or on the horizon to assess in this patient population.

Dr. Ece Cali: Yeah, we definitely have an unmet need to improve survival outcomes for stage III patients, and it's great to hear that there are so many efforts looking at different strategies to improve outcomes for these patients.

Thank you so much, Dr. Bradley, for this informative discussion and for sharing your insights. Any last thoughts?

Dr. Jeffrey Bradley: Yeah, we need something, you know. PACIFIC was first reported in 2017, and we really haven't made progress in terms of changing that standard of care control for the last eight years. So we need progress in this area.

Dr. Ece Cali: Yep, definitely. Thank you so much for joining, Dr. Bradley.

And thank you for listening to JCO Article Insights. Please come back for more interviews and article summaries and be sure to leave us a rating and review so others can find our show. For more podcasts and episodes from ASCO, please visit asco.org/podcasts.

The purpose of this podcast is to educate and to inform. This is not a substitute for professional medical care and is not intended for use in the diagnosis or treatment of individual conditions.

Guests on this podcast express their own opinions, experience, and conclusions. Guest statements on the podcast do not express the opinions of ASCO. The mention of any product, service, organization, activity, or therapy should not be construed as an ASCO endorsement.

DISCLOSURES

Dr. Bradley Honoria: Mevion Medical Systems, Inc. Consulting or Advisory Role: Varian, Inc, Genentech, Inc. Research Funding: Varian Medical Systems

Dr. Cali Research Funding Company: BeiGene, Nuvalent, Inc., Astra Zeneca

Guest Dr. Rusha Bhandari and host Dr. Davide Soldato discuss JCO article "Health Outcomes Beyond Age 50 Years in Survivors of Childhood Cancer: A Report From the Childhood Cancer Survivor Study, " with a particular focus on mortality data, development of secondary malignancies and the importance of education for both patients and healthcare providers regarding long-term follow-up and care.

TRANSCRIPT

The guest on this podcast episode has no disclosures to declare.

Dr. Davide Soldato: Hello, and welcome to JCO After Hours, the podcast where we sit down with authors from some of the latest articles published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology. I am your host, Dr. Davide Soldato, Medical Oncologist at Ospedale Policlinico San Martino in Genoa, Italy.

Today, we are joined by JCO author, Dr. Rusha Bhandari, a Pediatric Hematologist-Oncologist and Assistant Professor in the Department of Pediatrics and Population Science at City of Hope, California. Today, we will be discussing the article titled "Health Outcomes Beyond Age 50 Years in Survivors of Childhood Cancer: A Report From the Childhood Cancer Survivor Study."

So, thank you for speaking with us, Dr. Bhandari.

Dr. Rusha Bhandari: Thanks so much for having me.

Dr. Davide Soldato: So, I just want to go straight ahead in the paper and start from the title. So, we heard that you included in this study childhood survivors of pediatric cancer that were aged 50 years or higher. So, this is a very critical life stage when we know that there are a lot of aging-related comorbidities that can happen, also in the general population but potentially specifically in childhood cancer survivors. So, first of all, I wanted to ask you, why this specific study in this very specific population? Because I think that we had already some data in younger survivors, but now we are focusing specifically on patients aged 50 or more.

Dr. Rusha Bhandari: Absolutely. So, to answer that question, I'll take a little bit of a step back in terms of where we are now and where we came from in terms of treatment for childhood cancers. So, thankfully, we now have great curative therapies and survival rates for many childhood cancers, including the most common ones. But this was not necessarily the case 50 or more years ago. So, we essentially are now seeing the first generation of older survivors who are 30, 40, or more years from completion of their cancer treatment.

As you pointed out, we know from younger survivors that they have a markedly higher risk of malignancies and health conditions than the general population. You don't typically expect to see things like heart disease or diabetes, for example, in a young adult. But the question that remained was what the health status and risk of these conditions are in survivors who are entering this critical age, as you mentioned, 50 or older, when you do start to see these aging-related changes in the general population. And the question is whether we're still observing increased risks related to cancer treatment that was delivered 30 or more years ago in these survivors who are now entering ages 50 and beyond.

Dr. Davide Soldato: Thanks so much. You used the data from a study that is called the Childhood Cancer Survivor Study. So, just a little bit of explanation for our listeners. How is the study conducted? What type of data are you collecting? And specifically for the interest of the study that was reported in this manuscript, which outcomes were really important for you and were so evaluated in the manuscript?

Dr. Rusha Bhandari: Yes. So, the Childhood Cancer Survivor Study is a really excellent resource that combines information from children who were treated across North America at various different centers and sites. So it gives us a really good understanding of how different survivors are doing as they do progress through their survivorship journey.

The Childhood Cancer Survivor Study includes a baseline questionnaire when participants are first eligible or first enter the study, and then includes a series of follow-up questionnaires to really understand how they're doing, like I mentioned, as they progress throughout their survivorship journey. And so for this study, we really wanted to take a global look at how these patients were doing as they entered that older age range. And so we wanted to look at outcomes ranging from mortality through the health conditions that we've seen from other survivorship studies, including subsequent malignant neoplasms, other health conditions, I mentioned earlier heart disease and other comorbidities we know survivors can be at increased risk for, and also things like frailty, which we know is, you know, the most widely recognized phenotype of aging. And we see that earlier on in our younger survivors. We want to see how this translated to these older survivors and then also other health outcomes like their health status. What is their self-report of their physical health, their mental health? Things like that. So we wanted a very comprehensive understanding of their health.

Dr. Davide Soldato: This is a very comprehensive study. Right now it includes more than 30,000 patients that have been treated for childhood cancer, but specifically looking at the question of survivors aged 50 years or higher, you included more than 7,000 patients inside of this study. So, looking at the first outcome that you mentioned, which I think it's also one of the most important, you look specifically at mortality, and in this specific population, you saw a striking three-fold increase in mortality when comparing these survivors with the general population. I just wanted to dive in this result and ask you: What do you see as the main driver for this excess mortality in this population of survivors? And as you were mentioning, the study also collects information about the treatment received. So, was there any association with a specific kind of treatment that was received for curing these childhood cancers?

Dr. Rusha Bhandari: I agree. I would say it's striking to see that mortality risk among the survivors relative to the general population. And we do know, again from prior studies, that survivors of childhood cancer do have an increased risk of mortality compared to the general population, but I think looking at those curves of the cumulative mortality risk was really quite striking as they diverge, and that's, you know, just so long past their initial diagnosis and treatment.

We know that subsequent malignant neoplasms or secondary cancers are a really an important contributor to mortality among survivors. And I think it was important to note that even in these older survivors, it's still such an important contributor to mortality, and I think this really highlights the need for us to better understand what is driving specific secondary cancers and what are the differences in the biology and treatment approaches for some of these cancers? And how might that then be contributing to the mortality risk?

Dr. Davide Soldato: Related to the treatment mortalities - because I think that one of the main forces of the study, as it is conducted, is that it contains a lot of information regarding radiotherapy, allogeneic transplant, surgery, type of chemotherapy received by these survivors - so, are we able right now with the data that we have to pinpoint which of these treatments can potentially lead to such increased risk of mortality?

Dr. Rusha Bhandari: So, we weren't able to look at the comprehensive treatment exposures and mortality risk for this paper. So that might be one of the questions I would put on the side. We were able to look at that in relation to subsequent malignant neoplasms and health conditions though, as you mentioned.

Dr. Davide Soldato: Another thing that I think is very important is that you were able to look at specific causes for mortality. So for example, you mentioned the increased rate of neoplasm in this population and specifically, more or less 7.6% of the patients that were included in the study developed another neoplasm after the ones they were cured for in the childhood period. So, you saw a wide range of cancer, for example, bone and soft tissue sarcomas, breast cancer, genitourinary cancer. And as you were mentioning, there were some associations for treatment modalities that were associated with a higher risk of developing this type of cancer. Can you expand a little bit on this?

Dr. Rusha Bhandari: Absolutely. And so the key part here was that we really looked at any of these outcomes that occurred beyond age 50. What we found was there is still an increased risk of secondary cancers beyond that initial childhood cancer diagnosis, but when we really looked at that data, it was specifically among survivors who had a history of receiving radiation. And we did not necessarily see an association between different chemotherapy exposures and secondary cancers. And I think this speaks to what we're now learning in terms of the very long-term effects of radiation and how that impacts ongoing health risk even in patients who are 30 or more years out from their treatment. And I think it really highlights the importance of these- the efforts that have been made in the more recent decades to really try and reduce or eliminate radiation where possible, you know, as we've come to understand more about these long-term effects from it.

Dr. Davide Soldato: A clear association with radiation therapy but no association when we look at specific types of chemotherapy that were used for curing this childhood cancer.

Another thing that I think it's very interesting and you briefly mentioned before is that potentially when we look at these secondary malignant neoplasm that develop in this situation, we might also see some outcomes that are not comparable to the one of the general population, meaning that we managed to cure less this type of cancer when they develop in these childhood survivors. So, I just wanted to understand if you could provide us with a little bit of perspective also from a clinical standpoint being a pediatric hematologist-oncologist as to why this might be happening and how can we potentially increase the cure rate also in this population of childhood cancer survivors?

Dr. Rusha Bhandari: Absolutely. While that was not the focus of this study, it was something that we were certainly interested in is understanding how even once a childhood cancer survivor, for example, develops a health condition or a secondary cancer further into survivorship, how does that outcome then differ from someone in the general population? And there's a lot of interest in ongoing studies actually evaluating that and understanding what are the differences from the initial presentation, biology, the characteristics of that cancer, through how they're treated. So I don't know if we have all of the answers for that quite yet, but you can imagine if someone hypothetically had a history of receiving a lot of anthracycline chemotherapy or already having received a lot of radiation, that might impact what treatment they might receive for that secondary cancer or if they already have other existing comorbidities that need to be taken into consideration.

Dr. Davide Soldato: Speaking about comorbidities, you were mentioning in the beginning that one of the focuses of this scientific work was really to try and see whether also this type of adverse health outcomes that can be potentially related to treatments were more frequent among these childhood cancer survivors. So I think that it's very interesting that for this comparison, you were able to use the data from the siblings of the patients who were included inside of the study. So, just a little bit of a comment on why you decided to use this specific methodology, which I think has a very nice touch to it when we look at these outcomes like, for example, diabetes or cardiovascular disease, and in general, do we see an increased number of chronic health conditions among survivors who were treated for childhood cancers?

Dr. Rusha Bhandari: Yes, so this is a really excellent strength of the Childhood Cancer Survivor Study is that they have information, longitudinal information, on survivors as well as their siblings. So, you know, when we were discussing the design of the study, I mentioned that we have initial baseline questionnaires as well as multiple follow-up questionnaires, and that is for both the survivors and the siblings. And so we're able to really understand their health course over time. We chose to evaluate sibling data because then you're really able to look at people who have similar characteristics, right? Similar environmental exposures in theory, potentially similar genetic predispositions and makeups and things like that. And so you can really try and have as good of a comparison as possible.

Dr. Davide Soldato: Did we see any increase in chronic health condition when looking at survivors compared to the siblings?

Dr. Rusha Bhandari: We did. And while that's been reported before, again, I think it's important to demonstrate that in this older population when you would expect that these siblings would now also be starting to develop different health conditions.

Dr. Davide Soldato: One thing that was very interesting is that when we look at the coexistence of multiple comorbid conditions and chronic condition in this population, we also see that for some of these survivors, they basically have the same rates of comorbidities as compared to siblings who are potentially 20 years older than them. So I think that there is really that striking point, as you were mentioning before, of accumulation of changes, also physiological changes that can potentially drive a higher frailty index, which was also higher when looking at these survivors compared to their siblings.

One outcome that was really not that worse when we look at survivors of childhood cancer was actually mental health. And as I read the paper, it was something that really surprised me a little bit because you would imagine that going through such a harsh diagnosis, such very complex treatment, very early in their life could potentially lead to some worse health outcomes also in terms of mental health over time. But this was not seen. And just a comment on this, because I think it's a very surprising data.

Dr. Rusha Bhandari: Yes, I appreciate that question. So, as you mentioned, mental health is such an important issue for patients, both those undergoing treatment as well as those in long-term survivorship. And in our study, we found that survivors were not more likely, as you mentioned, to report poor mental health compared to their siblings. And I think there's a few possible reasons for this.

You know, again, this is self-reported data amongst siblings and survivors who survived to at least 50 years of age and completed a questionnaire. And so that is the group of individuals that we were able to evaluate this in, so we have to keep that in mind. But I think our findings may also reflect the resilience of this particular cohort of aging survivors that we included. This finding has been reported in other studies of survivors as well, and so I think it very well may speak to the resilience of the cohort that we're looking at.

Dr. Davide Soldato: Going back just a little bit, you mentioned that the majority potentially of these survivors who were included in the current analysis were treated between 1970s and 1980s. So, as you were mentioning before, radiotherapy was seen as a significant contributor to second neoplasm and also to the increase of this chronic health condition. So, do you believe that there is still a role for these survivorship studies as we are approaching treatment modalities where radiotherapy is administered less frequently or with lower doses or omitted at all in the treatment course of these survivors?

Dr. Rusha Bhandari: Absolutely. I think you mentioned a very important point, which is these findings are most applicable to the patients who were included in this cohort or similar cohorts, those who were treated in the 1970s and 80s who now are 50 years or older at this point in time. And as you know, treatment modalities have really changed. You know, as you mentioned, we'll use less radiation in many cases whenever possible, but there are so many new modalities, so many different chemotherapeutic agents, immunotherapy. There's so much more we need to learn about the long-term effects of some of these newer treatment modalities. And also, we've been able to really intensify our treatment regimens with improvements in both treatment approaches and supportive care. And so I think we have a lot to learn about those late effects, and ongoing studies are certainly needed as we continue to have this growing population of older survivors.

Dr. Davide Soldato: And now a more general question which builds on the results of the study but goes a little bit beyond what was the scope of the research. So we have just discussed that there is an excess mortality in general, there is a higher risk for secondary malignancies in this population, we see higher accumulation of chronic comorbid conditions that need to be treated. So building on these results, in your opinion, what would be the best framework to follow up these patients over time? Because I imagine that for some of these patients who have been treated 30, 40 years before the moment where we see this type of events, they can be potentially also discharged from more specialistic medical care. So what is the best course of action? Should we keep all of these patients under observation in a very specialistic environment under the care of the oncologist or the pediatric oncologist? Should we create a stronger bond with general practitioners so they know that there is this problem?

Dr. Rusha Bhandari: Yes, I mean, I think you're reading my mind. We thankfully do have evidence-based guidelines. We utilize the Children's Oncology Group Long-Term Follow-Up Guidelines, which include screening recommendations for secondary cancers, chronic health conditions, everything based on the underlying diagnosis and treatment that these patients received. But we recognize that a large proportion of these survivors do not continue to have lifelong follow-up at a survivorship center, but really do need that specialized screening based on their treatment that they received. And I think for that reason, it's so important that we continue to build relationships with their primary care providers and really make sure that both patients and their providers have this information at hand regarding what their treatment is and what the screening is that they need and that we be able to have this community whereby we are able to help inform the screening in our own survivorship clinics, but also help guide some of the primary care providers who are going to be seeing these patients in the long run.

Dr. Davide Soldato: Do we have any data showing what is the adherence rate of these patients to this type of continuous screening and monitoring over time? Because I imagine that that might also be a point for improvement in terms of quality of care. Can we retain as much childhood cancer survivors as we want as we are learning that there are all these potential negative health outcomes over time?

Dr. Rusha Bhandari: We definitely within the survivorship community do want to help make sure as many survivors as possible are being engaged, again, whether it's at their specific cancer center or whether it's in the community, recognizing that for many reasons, it's not feasible to always return to that cancer center for your regular survivorship care. I think there's a lot we can do. Going a little bit outside the scope of your question, but I think there's a lot that we can do nowadays in terms of telehealth and being able to communicate with patients and their providers even if they're geographically not located right near us. But we do have data that shows that the further out many patients get from their initial diagnosis and treatment, the less often they might follow up with a survivorship provider. Some of this varies by different treatment.

Dr. Davide Soldato: So, basically the final question is that we need more education and potentially more resources for survivorship clinics and in general to better inform patients and providers about these potential long-term outcomes.

Dr. Rusha Bhandari: That's certainly a focus of our survivorship program, for example, is to make sure that we're able to educate patients, inform them of their risks, and why certain screening tests are recommended at certain times in their survivorship journey. And then I think again, thankfully nowadays with all of the electronic medical records and different methods for us to communicate, there's a lot of opportunity for us to continue building these relationships with those primary care providers and making sure they have the information at their fingertips as well as to be able to work in conjunction with these patients to continue to formulate their plans and carry out these screenings and then again, like I was saying, have an easy open line of communication with the oncology centers if they do have any questions.

Dr. Davide Soldato: Thanks so much.

This brings us to the end of this episode. I would like to thank again Dr. Bhandari for joining us today.

Dr. Rusha Bhandari: Thank you so much. It's been a real pleasure speaking with you.

Dr. Davide Soldato: And we appreciate you sharing more on your JCO article titled "Health Outcomes Beyond Age 50 Years in Survivors of Childhood Cancer: A Report From the Childhood Cancer Survivor Study."

If you enjoy our show, please leave us a rating and review and be sure to come back for another episode. You can find all ASCO shows at asco.org/podcasts.

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Guest Dr. Sundar Jagannath and host Dr. Davide Soldato discuss JCO article "Long-Term (≥5-Year) Remission and Survival After Treatment With Ciltacabtagene Autoleucel in CARTITUDE-1 Patients With Relapsed/Refractory Multiple Myeloma," and the efficacy of CAR-T cell therapy in patients with heavily pretreated RRMM (relapsed/refractory multiple myeloma).

TRANSCRIPT

Dr. Davide Soldato: Hello and welcome to JCO After Hours, the podcast where we sit down with authors from some of the latest articles published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology. I am your host, Dr. Davide Soldato, medical oncologist at Ospedale San Martino in Genoa, Italy. Today, we are joined by JCO author, Professor Sundar Jagannath, Professor of Medicine at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and the Tisch Cancer Institute. He also serves as Network Director for the Center of Excellence for Multiple Myeloma, and he is an internationally recognized expert in the field of multiple myeloma.

Today, we will be discussing the article titled, "Long-Term Remission and Survival After Treatment With Ciltacabtagene Autoleucel in CARTITUDE-1 Patients With Relapsed/Refractory Multiple Myeloma." Thank you for speaking with us, Professor Jagannath.

Dr. Sundar Jagannath: Thank you for having me, Dr. Davide Soldato. It is a pleasure to be here. JCO is a highly recognized journal among the oncologists, so I am very happy and privileged to be here today.

Dr. Davide Soldato: Thank you so much for being with us.

So, I wanted to start a little bit with the rationale of the study and the population that was included in the study. So, the trial that we are discussing, CARTITUDE-1, was already published before, and we observed very good results with a single infusion of cilta-cel. So we had previously reported a median progression-free survival of 30 months, and median overall survival was not reached. So, I just wanted to ask you if you could guide us a little bit into the population that was included in the study and also explain a little bit to our listeners what is the drug that we are discussing, cilta-cel.

Dr. Sundar Jagannath: It is a CAR T-cell. This is a patient's own lymphocytes, which goes through apheresis and is sent to the company, where they modify it and introduce the B cell receptor. In this case, you know, there is a heavy chain gene receptor for the BCMA, and in cilta-cel, there are actually two receptor sites on each molecule, or there are two binding domains on each receptor molecule. So, it is considered to be quite efficacious. As you reported, the earlier results that the patients who participated, 97% of the patient responded.

Now, you asked about the patients who participated in the clinical trial. This clinical trial was conducted between July of 2018 and October of 2019. At that time, this was a phase 1b/phase 2 trial, and the whole idea was to take patients who had relapsed all the available treatment regimen so that these patients were considered to have, in the unmet medical need situation. So, what does that entail? That means the patient should have been exposed to a proteasome inhibitor, to an immunomodulatory molecule, and to an anti-CD38 monoclonal antibody and should have received at least three or more prior lines of therapy and should be actually progressing on their last line of therapy. So with that requirement, if you look at it, the median number of prior therapy on the patients who participated was actually six.

So patients were heavily pretreated. They had exhausted all available treatment options. So, they can participate in this clinical trial. And if not, there have been real-world evidence, such as LocoMMotion, which had reported what is the outcome for such a patient if they were treated outside of this clinical trial, if they were treated with the then available regimen. Their median progression free survival would have been only 3 months, and most patients would have lost their life within a year. So, this was truly an unmet medical need with patients in a very difficult clinical situation. Let's put it that way. So, those were the patients who participated in this particular trial.

Dr. Davide Soldato: Thank you very much. And as we mentioned before, the results that were obtained in this clinical trial were really very interesting.

And now, in this issue of the Journal of Clinical Oncology, you are reporting data with a longer follow up. So we are actually at more than 5 years of follow up for the patients included in this trial. So, I just wanted a little bit of insight into why you decided to report these long-term outcomes and what type of information do you think you could provide with this study to the medical community?

Dr. Sundar Jagannath: This is very important because this was a clinical trial that was done in patients who were, as I said, in unmet medical need. Most of the patients had prior stem cell transplantation, had gone through a proteasome inhibitor. Many of them have had both Velcade and carfilzomib treatment. Most of them had been exposed to lenalidomide and pomalidomide. And as required, all of the patients had to have had prior exposure to anti-CD38 monoclonal antibody or daratumumab. So, the patients were heavily pretreated.

Typically, TIL CAR T-cells came into the field at this particular moment, until then, we were developing small molecules, and they usually would have a PFS of 3 months and median life expectancy of a year, the overall response rate of 30%, and that is how, if you look back, that is how carfilzomib was approved, that is how pomalidomide was approved. So, the drugs which were approved, including daratumumab, you know, the response rate was in the same ballpark. So you would see that most agents, single agents, would have had a response rate in the neighborhood of 30%, the progression-free survival would have been between 3 to 5 months or 6 months at the most, and the life expectancy was short.

And here comes a drug, and when I was following the patients at Mount Sinai, I found that there were a subset of patients, they got one-time treatment and they were in complete remission, no trace of cancer with annual evaluation with PET CT and bone marrow evaluation for MRD. So, I said this is remarkable, and this needs to be reported. And I went to the Janssen and company, and they agreed to review the entire experience. This is remarkable that 32 of the 97 patients, or one third of the patients, were alive and progression-free. This is unheard of for any clinical trial until now, that the patient will be progression-free, one third of the patients on a clinical trial will be progression-free, in the late stage of their disease. So that is the most important impact. And that is why this 5-year follow-up results were presented.

Dr. Davide Soldato: Thank you very much. That was very clear. And as you said, we are speaking about a population that was heavily pretreated, that had exhausted all type of treatment options outside of a clinical trial. And as you said, one third of the patients was alive and progression-free after 5 years from being included and infused inside of the study. So, considering this population that, as we said, had received all treatment options, I was wondering if you observed any kind of differences in terms of disease characteristics when looking at these patients that had exceptional response, so, alive and progression-free at 5 years, and the patients that sadly had developed a progression after the infusion in the study.

Dr. Sundar Jagannath: This is very important because we wanted to see who are the patients who are having this exceptional outcome. And we looked at all the 97 patients. If we look at all the patients, we saw that there were initially, out of the 97, 17 patients died earlier in the disease course due to treatment related complications, etc. But there were about 46 patients who had progression of disease and 32 patients, or one third, were alive without progression of disease. Then we looked at the 46 patients who had progression of disease. Of them, we found that 30 had disease progression and its complication, and there were actually 13 patients who were still alive even after progression of disease. So we decided to compare these 46 patients who had progression of disease versus 32 patients who had no progression of disease to see what is the difference. To our surprise, the age was similar, male, female distribution was similar. High-risk cytogenetics, which we would have thought, you know, that is why we say high-risk disease, the term, high-risk cytogenetics was equally distributed. That was really a surprise. Number of lines of prior therapy, number of exposure to drugs, all of that was the same. So that was also interesting.

But a theme did emerge. Patients, in general, tend to have lower burden of disease who had the exceptional outcome. But there is one which we considered as bad, the extramedullary disease. Multiple myeloma being a blood cancer, it is usually in the bone marrow. When it starts growing outside of the bone marrow, the extramedullary disease, usually it portends poor prognosis. But we were surprised that actually there were an equal number of extramedullary disease patients even in the long-term survivor as those who had progressed of disease. So the most important takeaway was patients who had lower burden of disease, they had less number of myeloma cells in their bone marrow, percentage wise, and the soluble BCMA level was lower. Soluble BCMA is an indirect measure of the amount of plasma cells in the patient's body. It is like a tumor burden. So they were low.

So, this was an important finding because it has future ramification, as you can understand. If this treatment is made available earlier in the disease course of the patients, where we are able to control the disease better, then more patients are likely to have such wonderful outcomes as one third of the patient experience in the late stage of the disease.

Dr. Davide Soldato: So, you already mentioned soluble BCMA as a marker of potentially better prognosis as being correlated to a lower volume of disease. I was wondering if you could give us some more information about the biomarkers that you evaluated in the study. For example, you evaluated a little bit the CAR T expansion kinetics and also some others that I think could be interesting and could point to some population that experienced such important benefit.

Dr. Sundar Jagannath: That is a very important point because CAR T-cell, it is a live cell and its efficacy depends upon how well the CAR T-cell is going to function. And then, you know, the patient undergoes apheresis. This is a patient's own lymphocyte. So first and foremost is who would generate good CAR T-cell. Those who have plenty of lymphocytes at the time they are coming for apheresis. This is likely to happen earlier in the course of the disease than in patients who have gone through numerous lines of therapy and exhausted. So, in this particular trial, of course this was in late stage of the disease, and so we were able to show patients who had lower number of T cell in circulation, and the way to measure is if they had more neutrophils and less lymphocytes. So that is what is called as a higher T cell over neutrophil, they did better. If they have more neutrophil than T cells, then they did not do well. So, procurement.

The second one is also whether the T cells are more naive, you know, not exhausted T cells. So more naive T cells, if you are able to procure from the patient, they did very well. Now, after the CAR T-cell manufacture, then the expansion, when you put it back into the patient, if the T cells expand very well, so that the effector, that is the CAR T-cells to the tumor ratio is good, so there are more effector cells, the CAR T was able to expand and the amount of tumor was less, then the efficacy was very, very good. As I said, the patients in this group, those who had a lower burden of disease, they did better, and that is because of the CAR T-cell expansion, so the effector to the target ratio was favorable. So that is another important.

And then there are also the type of CAR T-cells, having CD4 T cells with central memory phenotype at the peak expansion also makes a difference. So all of that matters. But this is important because the efficacy of the CAR T-cell, it is persistent, long persistent and keeping the cancer down. Its ability to get rid of the cancer completely at the first go around because usually we are not able to detect the CAR T-cells beyond 6 months in the majority of patients and very rarely after a year or two. So it is very uncommon to find the CAR T-cells in circulation or even in the regular bone marrow evaluation.

So, efficacy, the expansion, having naive T cells, having good effector to target ratio and more central memory kind of T cell, because if it is all effector T cell, they will get quickly utilized and get exhausted, whereas the central memory cells can expand more and give more effective CAR T-cells.

Dr. Davide Soldato: Thank you very much.

I was wondering if you could guide us a little bit into what is your opinion regarding the positioning of CAR T-cells given all of these logistics that is necessary compared, for example, with bispecific antibodies against BCMA, which have the same target, but they do not have all of these logistics before being administered to the patient.

Dr. Sundar Jagannath: That is a very important question, how to sequence these treatments now that we have two BCMA-directed CAR T-cells available. We have three BCMA-directed bispecific and one GPRC5D-directed bispecific antibodies are available. And so the question comes in for at least the currently approved CAR T-cell therapy, there is an obligatory time. You have to go through apheresis and you have to ship to the company, and there is a manufacturing time, roughly about 2 months before they can receive it. During that time, you want to make sure the patient's disease is under control. So that is a given. There are several ways to look at it when we evaluate the patient and talk to the patient.

One good thing is now the two CAR T-cells which are approved, one is cilta-cel we talked about, and the other one is ide-cel. Ide-cel is approved in earlier line of therapy, two or more prior lines of therapy, and cilta-cel is approved in patients who have failed one line of therapy and who are lenalidomide refractory. So, the treatment of CAR T-cell is available earlier. And as I said, when you administer CAR T-cell earlier, you are able to keep the disease burden down, and it is a one and done deal. There is a better quality of life for the patient, and you are able to produce long, durable remission and potentially a cure.

Now coming to the bispecific, they are currently available in later lines of therapy. So if you look at it from a patient's perspective, you can use the CAR T-cell earlier and then go through the bispecific therapy. But if the patient comes with relapsed refractory myeloma and has not used the CAR T-cell therapy and has not used the bispecific therapy, then the physicians have to decide which one they want to use. If somebody's disease is rapidly progressing and they need immediate tumor reduction and they have already exhausted all available therapy, then going through BCMA bispecific therapy is quite appropriate.

And secondly, CAR T-cell therapy is generally given to somewhat physically more fit patients, whereas bispecific therapy, because you are giving antibody at step-wise dosing in this patient, and you have the ability to stop at any particular dose and then come back and redose, whereas CAR T is, you just give it to them one time, you have a lot more control. So intermediate frail or even frail patients can go through bispecific therapy, whereas it would not be in the best interest of the patient to go through a CAR T-cell therapy when they are frail. So that is another important point.

But from the information available, when the patient goes on a BCMA bispecific therapy and they start progressing on treatment, usually it is their T cells are exhausted or the BCMA is no longer expressed on the tumor cells. So coming with CAR T-cell later on is usually not effective, whereas giving CAR T-cell earlier, if the patient relapses later, they have good T-cell function and most of the time the BCMA is still expressed. So you are able to give the BCMA to the maximum benefit by using the CAR T first and BCMA later. So if somebody asked me how to sequence this, just off the bat, you will say CAR T first, BCMA bispecific second. But as I said, there are unique situations.

Then there is another potential that is happening. You can change the target. You can use a BCMA against GPRC5D to reduce the tumor, and then go ahead and consolidate it with a CAR T-cell therapy. That is also possible. You are changing the target from GPRC5D to BCMA, the tumor is already down, so the patient is likely to benefit. So these are all newer treatment options which have become available to the physician. So they will have to look at individual patients and decide what is the best course of action for that patient.

Dr. Davide Soldato: So, I just wanted to close a little bit with your opinion about how these results translate into clinical practice. So considering this outstanding 5-year data that we have seen, one third of the patients who are alive and progression-free after a single infusion of cilta-cel, do you think that we could start to think about functional cure even in patients who have a diagnosis of relapsed refractory multiple myeloma?

Dr. Sundar Jagannath: My feeling is this is important because in this particular study which is published, 12 patients who were followed at Mount Sinai out of the 32 patients who are alive and progression-free, 12 were followed at Mount Sinai. And they were evaluated every year with bone marrow MRD testing by clonoSEQ in 11 of the 12 patients, and one was by multiparametric flow cytometry. So most of them were 10 to the minus 6, not even one in a million cancer cells, and all of them had functional imaging, which is called PET CT every year. So these were patients who had no evidence of disease that we could detect with the technology available today, serologically, in the bone marrow, or anywhere else in the body with a PET CT. They were found to be disease free after a single infusion of cilta-cel. So, that would be almost to the definition of a cure because if you look at cure as a definition for any cancer, cure is defined as a state of complete remission with no trace of cancer that persists over a period of 5 years or longer without maintenance. And that will be applicable for breast cancer, lymphoma, leukemia. So it is a general statement. And if we use that in myeloma too, then I could say that these 12 patients from my center, we proved that they are cured of their myeloma. They are not functionally cured. You've got to remember, there is only cure. That was the definition across all diseases. So there is nothing like a functional cure. They are cured of myeloma.

So is myeloma curable? This is the first time we are looking at that. We do know, every physician treating myeloma that there are patients out there, 10 year and beyond, without evidence of disease. This has been published by University of Arkansas, Bart Barlogie's group, who has been saying that myeloma is a curable disease for a long time. And many others have shown long-term follow up. But this one in a late stage disease, we were able to show that they were one treatment with no maintenance. All other studies have been in newly diagnosed myeloma patients. Nobody has shown in late relapse patients on a clinical trial a third of the patient will be progression-free. And 12 of them who were studied were actually disease free. So they were cured of the disease.

So if we accept that, then the next question is, first step towards cure is achieving complete remission. They should have no monoclonal protein by any technology you want to use, no measurable residual disease using next gen sequencing or clonoSEQ, and functional imaging whole body PET CT or whole body MRI. So that is important, definition of the complete remission. And then it has to be sustained. That is something the IMWG and IMS, International Myeloma Society, they will have to come together for a consensus. How many years should they be followed and should be in this kind of status with no trace of cancer? Is it, 3 years are enough? 4 years enough? 5 years is enough? For me, I said in this paper, 5 years is a good definition for achieving a potential cure.

Then you use the term 'functionally cured'. I have a problem with functionally cured and operationally cured or whatever. Functionally cured was originally put out by Paiva from Spain. There were 8% of newly diagnosed myeloma patients who have, after they go get treated, they will have an MGUS like phenomenon, a small amount of paraprotein detectable, and they are only 8%. And he said that these patients could be off treatment and the disease does not progress. But the problem is when you are giving treatment like maintenance therapy continuously until progression, you do not know exactly who is in the MGUS situation. So you have to have done sophisticated flow cytometry like Paiva did, and it is not quite clinically applicable. So functionally cured applies only for 8% of the people, so it should go out of the vocabulary.

Then you can say 'operationally cured'. These are the patients traditionally Bart Barlogie and others showed that they have a large number of patients who have been followed for 10 years with no recurrence of disease, not on treatment. But in those days, they did not have MRD PET CT and all of them done systematically. So that is why they had to come up with a situation where they said they were operationally cured. So yes, myeloma patients have been cured since auto transplant was introduced. I completely agree. It is not new to the CAR T-cell therapy. But the beauty of the CAR T-cell therapy was it was in relapsed refractory myeloma, unmet medical need, number one. Number two, they were studied systematically. It was a clinical trial adjudicated by FDA and EMA for drug approval, cilta-cel was approved. So these patients were carefully followed, and it was a multi-center study. And in that group of patients, we were able to show patients- So, I think this would indicate cure is a reality in myeloma, and as these kind of treatments, immunologic treatment, either it is a CAR T-cell therapy or BCMA bispecific or whatever, there is a chance more patients are likely to be cured, and these treatments have to move forward and so that we are looking towards a cure.

That is the beauty of it, and I just thank you for asking and also throwing in this so-called functionally cured, which people like to use casually, and I say it is time to talk more cure and not stuck with functionally cured because that does not allow the field to progress.

Dr. Davide Soldato: Thank you very much. That was very interesting.

Dr. Sundar Jagannath: And provocative.

Dr. Davide Soldato: A little bit, but I think that we needed to close the podcast with this kind of reflection coming from someone who is an expert in the field, as you are.

So, I really wanted to thank you for joining us today and for sharing more on your article, which is titled, "Long-Term Remission and Survival After Treatment With Ciltacabtagene Autoleucel in CARTITUDE-1 Patients With Relapsed/Refractory Multiple Myeloma."

If you enjoy our show, please leave us a rating and a review and be sure to come back for another episode. You can find all ASCO shows at asco.org/podcasts.

Dr. Sundar Jagannath: Thank you.

The purpose of this podcast is to educate and to inform. This is not a substitute for professional medical care and is not intended for use in the diagnosis or treatment of individual conditions.

Guests on this podcast express their own opinions, experience, and conclusions. Guest statements on the podcast do not express the opinions of ASCO. The mention of any product, service, organization, activity, or therapy should not be construed as an ASCO endorsement.

In this episode of JCO Article Insights, host Dr. Lauren Shih summarizes the article, "Xevinapant or Placebo Plus Platinum-Based Chemoradiotherapy in Unresected Locally Advanced Squamous Cell Carcinoma of the Head and Neck (TrilynX): A Randomized, Phase III Study" by Bourhis, et al published September 03, 2025

TRANSCRIPT

Host Dr. Shannon Westin and guest Dr. Giancarlo Di Guiseppe discuss the JCO article "Long-Term Dynamic Financial Impacts Among Adolescents and Young Adults With Cancer: A Longitudinal Matched-Cohort Study"

TRANSCRIPT

The guest on this podcast episode has no disclosures to declare.

Dr. Shannon Westin: Hi everybody and welcome to another episode of JCO After Hours, the podcast where we go in depth on manuscripts that are published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology. I'm your host, Dr. Shannon Westin, social media editor of JCO and gynecologic oncologist extraordinaire.

I'm so very excited to talk to you today. We're going to speak about "Long-Term Dynamic Financial Impacts Among Adolescents and Young Adults With Cancer: A Longitudinal Matched-Cohort Study." And I'm joined today by Dr. Giancarlo Di Giuseppe. He has a PhD in epidemiology that he actually just defended with this very work you're going to hear about today at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health at the University of Toronto. He is now a research fellow at the Hospital for Sick Children.

Welcome, Dr. Di Giuseppe. It's so exciting to have you.

Dr. Di Giuseppe: Thank you so much for having me.

Dr. Shannon Westin: So we'll get right to it. Let's level set. Can you talk a little bit about the financial impact of cancer on survivors in general? I think this has been a growing area of interest and research, certainly.

Dr. Di Giuseppe: Yeah, and I think that's a very important question, and I'm so happy that this research is now becoming more popular in the research world because it really addresses a critical issue that cancer survivors and their families must face. You know, you're diagnosed with cancer, and now you need to take time off work because you're hospitalized for chemotherapy. You're going back and forth to the hospital, and that all requires time away from your employment, and as a result of that, that has a significant financial strain, both on you and your family. And that's during therapy.

Now, in survivorship, in the years after you've survived your cancer, you still need to deal with all the late effects associated with your treatment and your disease, and that can be psychological, physical, and that impacts your workability as well. So, it's not just exclusive to individuals undergoing treatment but also in survivorship afterwards. It really gets the financial strait that you face as a cancer survivor because you're time away from work and your lost productivity.

Dr. Shannon Westin: Yeah, that makes sense. Then I think it would be great to talk a little bit specifically about the patient population that you studied in this particular manuscript. Can you talk a little bit about the adolescent young adult cohort, you know, why you singled out this particular group of people?

Dr. Di Giuseppe: Absolutely. Adolescents and young adults, or AYAs, which I'll now refer to them as - I'm one of them - we're at a unique crossroads of our life and in our developmental stage of life. We are finishing our post-secondary education. We're entering the workforce. We're forming romantic relationships, and we're really achieving financial autonomy. It's because of this unique developmental stage in life where we've become quite susceptible to health shocks such as cancer. Really, does a cancer and the associated negative financial impacts affect our long term trajectory?

So, I'm just finishing my PhD. If I was diagnosed with cancer, I would require a year or two away from my studies. I may or may not finish my education that could then impact my employment and then my financial outcomes later on in life. So it's really this unique population who are going through so many transitions and changes in their lives. How does that cancer really impact that life course trajectory? I think it's unique from an adult who might have, you know, large savings where they can bear the brunt of their cancer financial impacts, whereas AYAs may not have that same financial stability, provide a safety net for the financial impact resulting from their disease.

Dr. Shannon Westin: You broke my heart a little bit. I realized I'm no longer in that group, so I guess it's time to move on. Okay.

So, let's talk a little bit about the overall design of the study. Can you just kind of walk us through how you set everything up?

Dr. Di Giuseppe: Yeah, absolutely. So it's a matched cohort study at the population level here in Canada. We have large national administrative databases, and we have this really unique set of data at the national level through Statistics Canada that we can link our cancer registry to tax records. It really provides this unique opportunity to longitudinally follow individuals from their disease forward in time.

The main overall design is the matched cohort study. At the time of diagnosis of a cancer case, they're matched to someone from the population on certain characteristics. I follow these individuals from the index date of their cancer case forward in time. The crux of the study itself is a quasi-experimental two-group pre-post study design where I have information before the cancer diagnosis, I have information from their income after their cancer diagnosis, and it's really quantifying how much does that total income change from before the cancer to the after-cancer period.

Dr. Shannon Westin: I'm always intrigued about hearing more about financial toxicity in general, certainly very multi-dimensional. Can you speak a little bit about the different ways that you can assess this and measure this and kind of what you chose?

Dr. Di Giuseppe: Yeah, so financial toxicity really has two main spheres of measurement. There's a direct and the indirect measurements of financial toxicity. So your direct financial toxicities could be related to actually paying for medical treatment and any sort of financial burden as a direct consequence of your disease. Fortunately here in Canada, we have a universal health care system, so patients don't have to pay directly for most of their treatment.

There's also indirect financial toxicities, which are not a direct result of the disease. So in this study here, one of the, or the indirect financial toxicity that I measured was the financial impact to income. That's not the only indirect financial toxicity. There could be out-of-pocket expenses for drugs that may not be covered in the universal health care system here. It could be lost productivity at work. There's really this direct and indirect financial toxicities that together result in a significant financial burden and hardships for cancer patients and survivors.

Dr. Shannon Westin: Okay, so you guys did a lot of matching. It was extensive. Can you speak a little bit about the factors you used to match your patients and your controls and kind of why you chose them?

Dr. Di Giuseppe: Yeah, absolutely. The matching I think is a really critical aspect of the study, and it really establishes this baseline period of individuals who are cancer-free, who look as similar as possible to the individuals who would eventually develop cancer. So I matched on birth year, sex, marital status, whether or not they had children, if they were born here in Canada or not, as well as a geographic measurement of census division. So it's really in the city or in a rural town. Then I also matched on a 5% buffer of their total income in the year prior to the cancer diagnosis. All this matching was really done in the year before they were diagnosed, and it's to establish this comparator cohort of individuals from the general population who looked as similar as possible to the individuals, or the AYAs, who would develop cancer. It's again to establish this baseline period of a control cohort who looks as similar as possible.

So any differences that we might see after the cancer can be attributed to the effects of the AYA who would develop cancer. It's quite powerful, I think, from a study design perspective because it establishes causal inference methods through the study design and through the matching itself. Fortunately, I was able to match on an extensive list of covariates given the large population-based data that I used, particularly the tax records. Tax records contain a whole wealth of information, your marital status, your sex, your income, where you live. So it really provided this rich opportunity to match as closely as possible the AYAs who would develop cancer to someone from the population who wouldn't.

Dr. Shannon Westin: Yeah, and I mean I think that's the only way to do this type of research and really make it generalizable and actually, you know, know that you can trust the results that you've got. So I just want to again congratulate you because I think this was just- when I read the design, I was so impressed.

So now that we know the design and we understand everything, let's talk a little bit about the characteristics of the actual patient population that you studied.

Dr. Di Giuseppe: Yeah, for sure. So average age of diagnosis was in their early 30s, so around 32 years old. The breakdown of the population was mostly females, so I think two-thirds of the cohort were actually females who were diagnosed with cancer. Really, a lot of the cancers were thyroid and the breast cancers. These cancers are more common in women than they are in men. So it's really reflective of the different distribution of cancer in AYAs compared to other populations like in children or in older adults.

Dr. Shannon Westin: All right, bottom line. What did your primary analysis demonstrate and how was the income different based on the types of cancer that people might have been diagnosed with?

Dr. Di Giuseppe: Yeah, the bottom line is actually quite a disturbing message, I would say, and it's really that cancer causes this long, prolonged financial hardship in survivors. That's, I think, a very important result from the study, and I think it has far-reaching implications. This study demonstrates that these individuals who were diagnosed with this disease that is unforeseen also pay a financial price, and that sustains for many years after their diagnosis. That's overall on average. Once I dove deeper, actually looking at the different cancer types, the message actually gets even more disturbing, I would say, particularly in some disease subgroups. So the central nervous system cancer survivors really have a large reduction in their income, which sustains over 25%, 10 years after their diagnosis, and they never really recover financially from their disease. There are some groups of cancer survivors who really pay a large financial price for their disease.

Dr. Shannon Westin: I don't know if you're able to tease this out. This is just me thinking off the top of my head. Do you think it's the long-lasting side effects?

Dr. Di Giuseppe: I think you hit the nail on the head there, absolutely. I think what we're seeing here is a direct result of the late effects that cancer survivors experience. CNS cancer survivors, whether that is a surgical resection, radiation to the head for their tumor, the late effects really impact these individuals in the post-cancer survivorship period. So I think what we're really seeing are these late effects here.

Dr. Shannon Westin: The other thing I was kind of struck by is the differential and income loss over time. Can you speak a little bit about that in your work?

Dr. Di Giuseppe: Yeah, absolutely. There really is this period of financial vulnerability in the first couple years of diagnosis. So that's year zero, one, two, and three, these first couple years when these individuals are diagnosed with cancer, they are significantly impacted by their disease financially. Some of these reductions in their income is 15%, 20% in the year of diagnosis and the year afterwards. It's unsurprising because this is when these individuals typically are undergoing their treatment. They're not working. They may have even lost their job or quit their job. So it's really reflective in the results in that first few years of their diagnoses where these financial impacts are the largest. I think it provides an opportunity where certain interventions might alleviate some of these large reductions in their income.

Dr. Shannon Westin: Well, I really was disturbed by your work, and I hate to kind of say it that way because it's such important work. So I'm really- congratulations on everything that you're able to achieve and especially your PhD. But I think shining a light on these types of things is always pretty rough when you really look at the nitty-gritty details. So any thoughts about where we go from here, how do we support these people?

Dr. Di Giuseppe: I think we can support them at multiple different levels. So at the individual level, I think within the clinic setting, financial screening for financial toxicity, financial literacy, I think all these things can be incorporated into cancer care continuum to kind of educate AYAs with cancer about the financial implications of their disease, both in the short and the long term. So I think educating these cancer patients is important.

I think at the employer level, really working at the institutional level to incorporate workplace accommodations that might facilitate the return to work process for cancer survivors after their treatment or during, I think would also make the financial burden slightly less if cancer survivors are able to return to work or not have to quit their job because of their disease. And then return to work easier, I think might alleviate some of the employment consequences that these individuals face, which then lead to their adverse financial effects.

Then I think also at the policy level, at the governmental level, whether that's incorporating any sort of fiscal stimulus for cancer survivors, whether they're under treatment or in survivorship, any sort of tax breaks that they might be available to them to kind of alleviate some of that financial stress. The reality of it is being diagnosed with cancer and having your income reduced by even 5% - cost of living is expensive, especially now - so I can't even imagine what cancer survivors who are in this economy are facing with rising inflation and cost of living going up. So I think really having tax breaks as well as financial aid for these cancer survivors could really support them both in their cancer journey while they're undergoing treatment as well as some of the sustained effects that they experience afterwards.

It's particularly important, as we touched on earlier, for CNS cancer survivors, right? These individuals have this sustained effect that never really returns back to normal, and I think having sort of disability pension or kind of financial aid for these individuals to support them, I think is important.

Dr. Shannon Westin: We see this all the time in gynecologic cancers, these young women that support their families, young children, and then lose their ability to do so due to their diagnosis and the treatment they have to receive. So I can't say this enough how important this work was and how honored I am to get to speak with you today. I learned a ton.

And thank you to all of you listeners. We're just so excited to have you. This has been long term dynamic financial impacts among adolescents and young adults with cancer: a longitudinal matched cohort study. Thanks again for listening to JCO After Hours, and please do check out our other offerings wherever you get your podcasts. Have an awesome day.

The purpose of this podcast is to educate and to inform. This is not a substitute for professional medical care and is not intended for use in the diagnosis or treatment of individual conditions.

Guests on this podcast express their own opinions, experience, and conclusions. Guest statements on the podcast do not express the opinions of ASCO. The mention of any product, service, organization, activity, or therapy should not be construed as an ASCO endorsement.

In this JCO Article Insights episode, Dr. Ece Cal interviews Dr. Martin Wermke, author of the JCO article, "Phase I Dose-Escalation Results for the Delta-Like Ligand 3/CD3 IgG-Like T-Cell Engager Obrixtamig (BI 764532) in Patients With Delta-Like Ligand 3+ Small Cell Lung Cancer or Neuroendocrine Carcinomas."

TRANSCRIPT

The disclosures for guests on this podcast can be found in the transcript.

Dr. Ece Cali: Welcome to this episode of JCO Article Insights. This is Dr. Ece Cali, JCO editorial fellow, and today I am joined by Dr. Martin Wermke, Professor for Experimental Cancer Therapy at Dresden University of Technology, to discuss the manuscript "Phase 1 Dose-Escalation Results for the Delta-Like Ligand 3/CD3 IgG-like T-Cell Engager Obrixtamig in Patients with DLL3+ Small Cell Lung Cancer or Neuroendocrine Carcinomas."

Obrixtamig is a bispecific T-cell engager that binds to DLL3 on tumor cells and CD3 on T-cells. This manuscript presents the phase 1A dose escalation results of Obrixtamig in patients with DLL3+ small cell lung cancer and neuroendocrine carcinomas. In this study, 168 patients were treated with Obrixtamig across four different dosing regimens. 49% of the patients had small cell lung cancer, 42% had extrapulmonary neuroendocrine carcinoma, and 8% had large cell neuroendocrine carcinoma of the lung. Patients received a median of two prior lines of therapy. 33% of the patients had brain metastases at baseline. Of note, this trial did not mandate baseline brain imaging. Maximum tolerated dose was not reached. 88% of the patients experienced a treatment-related adverse event, however, only 3.6% of the patients had to discontinue treatment due to treatment-related AEs, and dose reduction due to treatment-related AEs was documented in 2.4% of the patient population. Similar to the other DLL3-targeted bi-therapies, the most common adverse events included CRS in 57%, dysgeusia in 23%, and pyrexia in 21% of the patients. CRS events were mostly mild. They occurred more frequently in the first two to three doses. 9% of the patients experienced ICANS, of which 3% were graded as Grade 3 or higher.

And let's review the efficacy results. Responses were only seen in patients who received 90 microgram per kg or more once weekly or once every three weeks dosing. The objective response rate in patients who received an effective dose was 28%. If we review by tumor type, 21% of the small cell lung cancer patients, 27% of the extrapulmonary neuroendocrine carcinoma patients, and 70% of the large cell neuroendocrine carcinoma patients had objective response. Median duration of response was 8.5 months, though this data is immature due to short follow-up.

Dr. Wermke, DLL3-targeted bispecific T-cell engagers are reshaping the treatment landscape of small cell lung cancer. This trial investigates Obrixtamig in other high-grade neuroendocrine tumors as well. Can you put this trial into context for us and explain why it may represent an important step forward?

Dr. Martin Wermke: Yeah, thank you for providing me with the opportunity to discuss our data today. I think the data with Obrixtamig in small cell lung cancer are largely similar to what has been observed with other bispecific T-cell engagers such as tarlatamab with respect to the response rate and duration. It has, however, been to be mentioned that BI 1438001 had a bit more liberal inclusion criteria than other trials around. You already mentioned the fact that we allowed the inclusion of patients without mandatory brain imaging, which led to some patients having their brain mets been diagnosed during the treatment with obrixtamig and then adding to the progressive disease patients. That is something which was not the case with the tarlatamab trials where you really had to have a brain imaging before, and in the Phase 1 trial you were even required to treat the brain mets before you included the patient. So it is a bit different, more poorest patient population.

I think the trial adds on existing data by being the first trial to also include non-SCLC neuroendocrine carcinoma of other origin, for example from the gastrointestinal tract, and also by including large cell neuroendocrine carcinoma of the lung, which is a really hard to treat pulmonary neoplasm which currently lacks any standardized treatment. So that is really a step forward which we will build on in the future.

Dr. Ece Cali: And one thing I would note in this trial, only patients with tumor expressing DLL3 were enrolled. Can you tell us a little bit more about this target, DLL3 in the context of neuroendocrine tumors, and does DLL3 expression predict clinical outcomes after treatment with DLL3 BiTEs, or do we actually need other predictive biomarkers for these novel agents?

Dr. Martin Wermke: Yeah, thank you. That's a pretty interesting question. First of all, DLL3 is an atypical notch ligand, which is expressed by the majority of neuroendocrine carcinomas, virtually absent on healthy adult tissues. Therefore, turning it really into a bona fide target for T-cell engaging therapies, pretty low risk for on-target off-tumor side effects. We found that in all the patients we screened, we had an expression rate of about 94% in small cell lung cancer, 80% of large cell neuroendocrine carcinoma of the lung were positive, and also about 80% of the extrapulmonary neuroendocrine carcinoma. So it's really a high prevalence. So the fact that we only included DLL3+ tumors still means we included most of the patients that presented with these diseases.

I think at the moment there are no data suggesting a clear-cut association between DLL3 expression levels and outcome on DLL3 CD3 T-cell engagers. There's also not a lot published. If you want to find this out for tarlatamab, you have to look into their patent to really see the data, but it's not clear-cut and I'm sure we need other markers to complement that. And I think what probably plays a major role is intrinsic T-cell fitness. So the question how really diseased your T-cells are, how old you are, because age also correlates with the fitness of the immune system, and other patient characteristics such as tumor burden, we've seen all across the board that the higher the tumor burden, the lower the rate of prolonged response is in such trials. And I also think we need to focus on other components of the tumor microenvironment. So see how high the T-cell infiltration with obrixtamig is and how abundant suppressive elements like regulatory T-cells or myeloid-derived suppressive cells are. That is work which is currently being done. Data are emerging, but I don't think that at the moment we have any clear biomarker helping us to select who should not receive DLL3 T-cell engagers.

Dr. Ece Cali: Those are great points and there is a lot we need to learn about how to use these novel agents in the future.

I'd like to highlight the results in large cell neuroendocrine carcinoma of the lung. The response rate in this group was remarkably high at 70%. Though we should note the small sample size of only 14 patients in this trial. After first line chemoimmunotherapy, current approved options for this population have very modest clinical activity. Given these trial results, how do you envision the field moving forward for patients with large cell neuroendocrine carcinoma?

Dr. Martin Wermke: Yeah, I think LCNEC is really an area which urgently needs further improvement of therapeutic standards. At the moment, as I said, there is no real standard. We are usually extrapolating from results we have in small cell lung cancer or non-small cell lung cancer, but I don't think we have too many prospective trials really informing this. Of course, 14 patients is a small sample size, but I think it's still fair to say that we can claim that DLL3 T-cell engagers are not doing worse in LCNEC than they do in SCLC. And that's why I think we really need to move forward clinical trials that are specifically targeting this population. Although I fear a bit that, given the rareness of this disease and the aggressiveness of its phenotype, that this is probably not the main focus of the pharmaceutical industry. So I think it's up to us academic investigators to really come up with investigator-initiated trials trying to fill the knowledge gaps we have here.

Dr. Ece Cali: And one more thing that I want to talk about is the accessibility for these drugs. These novel agents are showing real promise in improving outcomes for patients with high-grade neuroendocrine tumors, an area where progress has been limited until very recently. However, as DLL3 BiTEs become more widely used, issues of logistics and access come into sharper focus. With unique toxicities and the specialized monitoring, their use is restricted to certain centers. Looking ahead, what kinds of strategies could help mitigate some of these adverse events or make these treatments more broadly available?

Dr. Martin Wermke: Yeah, I think if you look at countries like the United States where tarlatamab has already been approved, we can see how the management strategies are evolving. I've heard about a colleague equipping their patients with thermometers and a pill of Dexamethasone, alongside with a temperature control protocol and clearly instructing them, "If you measure a temperature above a certain level then start taking the Dexamethasone and come back to our office and we're going to take care of you." I think that's one way to move forward.

I think we are lucky in a way that CRS usually manifests within the first 24 hours. This was the same in our study, like in the tarlatamab studies. So we really know when the time of trouble is for our patients. And in this time, I think we need to instruct the patients to stay close to the hospital. I don't think we need to hospitalize all of them, but we probably need them to stay in a nearby hotel to be able to reach the emergency room if needed in a short period of time.

And I think we can also learn in this strategy how to manage bispecific antibodies from the experience our colleagues in hematology had because they have been using bispecific T-cell engagers for quite some years right now and they developed strategies and networks that were able to successfully treat these patients also on an outpatient basis. And I think that is clearly an experience we need to follow, acknowledging that we are talking about diseases which are much more frequent than the standard hematology indications.

Dr. Ece Cali: Thank you so much, Dr. Wermke, for this informative discussion and for sharing your perspective on this evolving field.

Dr. Martin Wermke: Yeah, thank you for providing me with the opportunity to talk about data. It was really great being able to share that, and I really think that we are just at the beginning of a new exciting area for the treatment of neuroendocrine carcinomas, and I think much improvement is yet to come for our patients.

Dr. Ece Cali: Yes, that's really exciting.

And thank you everyone for listening to JCO Article Insights. Please come back for more interviews and article summaries and be sure to leave us a rating and review so others can find our show. For more podcasts and episodes from ASCO, please visit asco.org/podcasts.

The purpose of this podcast is to educate and to inform. This is not a substitute for professional medical care and is not intended for use in the diagnosis or treatment of individual conditions.

Guests on this podcast express their own opinions, experience, and conclusions. Guest statements on this podcast do not express the opinions of ASCO. The mention of any product, service, organization, activity, or therapy should not be construed as an ASCO endorsement.

Dr. Martin Wermke's Disclosures

Honoraria: Lilly, Boehringer Ingelheim, SYNLAB, Janssen, Merck Serono, GWT, Amgen, Novartis, Pfizer, BMS GmbH & Co. KG, Regeneron, MJH/PER, Takeda

Consulting or Advisory Role: Bristol-Myers Squib, Novartis, Lilly, Boehringer Ingelheim, ISA Pharmaceuticals, Amgen, immatics, Bayer, ImCheck therapeutics, AstraZeneca, Tacalyx, Regeneron, Daiichi Sankyo Europe GmbH, Zymeworks, PharmaMar, Iovance Biotherapeutics, T-Knife, Genentech

Research Funding: Roche

Patents, Royalties, Other Intellectual Property

Travel, Accommodations, Expenses: Pfizer, Bristol-Myers Squibb, AstraZeneca, Amgen, GEMoaB, Sanofi/Aventis, immatics, Merck Serono, Janssen Oncology, Iovance Biotherapeutics, Daiichi Sankyo Europe GmbH"

Host Dr. Shannon Westin and guest Dr. Hani Babiker discuss the JCO article "Tumor Treating Fields With Gemcitabine and Nab-Paclitaxel for Locally Advanced Pancreatic Adenocarcinoma: Randomized, Open-Label, Pivotal Phase III PANOVA-3 Study."

TRANSCRIPT

TTFields in Locally Advanced Pancreatic Adenocarcinoma

Dr. Shannon Westin: Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of JCO After Hours, the podcast where we get in depth with manuscripts that have been published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology. I am your host, gynecologic oncologist Shannon Westin, social media editor at the JCO, and just excited to be here to learn today about pancreatic cancer.

None of our participants have conflicts of interest related to this podcast, and it is my honor to introduce Dr. Hani Babiker. He is an associate professor of medicine, consultant in oncology at the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, Florida.

Welcome, Dr. Babiker.

Dr. Hani Babiker: Hi, Dr. Westin. Thank you for the great opportunity to discuss our trial, and thank you for having me here. I really appreciate it, and I am excited.

Dr. Shannon Westin: All right, so are we. So we are going to be talking about "Tumor Treating Fields with Gemcitabine and Nab-Paclitaxel for Locally Advanced Pancreatic Adenocarcinoma: A Randomized, Open-Label, Pivotal Phase III PANOVA-3 Study." This was simultaneously published and presented in the JCO and at the annual meeting of ASCO on 5/31/2025.

So, let's level set. Can you speak to us just a little bit about pancreatic cancer? What is the survival, and what is the typical treatment for locally advanced disease? This gynecologic oncologist has not kept up in this field.

Dr. Hani Babiker: Absolutely, Dr. Westin, and thank you for that question. Pancreatic adenocarcinoma is a lethal cancer. When I first started my career, the 5-year survival, per the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results, was at 4.5%. I always, whenever I was giving talks, say that I really hope that I will see it in the double digit. Now, the 5-year survival for all pancreatic adenocarcinoma is 13.3%. And the 5-year survival, and although it is a double digit, I still hope that I will see it in a higher double digit in the future. It is even worse in patients with metastatic cancer, about 3% 5-year survival for metastatic pancreatic cancer. It is a dismal diagnosis. I really hope in the future we will find a better therapeutic approach to this lethal cancer.

Dr. Shannon Westin: Yes, I just lost a very dear friend and colleague to this disease, so I completely agree with you.

Well, now that we are settled kind of with the basics here, I would love to talk a little bit about kind of the primary piece of this intervention, the Tumor Treating Fields. So, how does this work? And what diseases has it gotten indications in as yet?

Dr. Hani Babiker: Absolutely. So, Tumor Treating Fields is alternating frequency electrical fields that have been studied preclinically and shown that it abrogates cancer cell proliferation. Earlier on, we knew that it inhibits polymerization of tubulin, and hence, it affects cancer cells from proliferating. Later, we are learning that there are multiple mechanisms of action. It affects permeability, allowing for better drug delivery. It also inhibits cancer cell proliferation through affecting autophagy mechanisms that pancreatic cancer cells will use for proliferating and becoming more aggressive. There is also some early data preclinically in colorectal cancer cell lines and lung cancer cell lines and in vivo models showing that it potentially could activate the microenvironment to make it more pro-immunogenic. We recently published papers showing that it could also affect the nanomechanical properties of the tumor microenvironment within pancreatic cancer, hinting towards affecting, potentially, the stroma.

So, there are multiple mechanisms to Tumor Treating Electric Fields. It is a new, novel therapeutic approach. Sometimes when I speak with my trainees, I say, "Well, we have surgery, we have radiation and chemotherapy, and this is something new." Tumor Treating Fields initially was studied in refractory GBM and got an indication there. Subsequently, frontline treatment of GBM in a randomized clinical trial, and then malignant pleural mesothelioma and non-small cell lung cancer. We have studied it in pancreatic cancer.

Dr. Shannon Westin: I don't think I have ever heard it described so perfectly. That was brilliant. So thank you, and I hope everyone listening knows that you just got a masterclass on this mechanism. You know, they dabbled in it a little bit in ovarian cancer and it didn't quite make the grade, so I was a little definitely disappointed. But very excited about the data we're going to talk about today.

So let's get into the PANOVA-3 study. Can you highlight the overall design and also the key eligibility criteria that would be helpful for our listeners?

Dr. Hani Babiker: Absolutely. So, it started off with preclinical work in pancreatic cancer showing Tumor Treating Fields with chemo abrogate cancer cell perforation. It led to a trial, the PANOVA-2 trial, that was run in Europe that showed efficacy for OS and PFS in patients with locally advanced pancreatic cancer, which included metastatic and locally advanced pancreatic cancer, more so in locally advanced that led to the PANOVA-3 trial, which was an international, global study. This was in more than 190 centers, 20 countries in Latin America, North America, Europe, and Asia. It was a randomized trial. Patients were randomized 1 to 1 to either chemotherapy with gemcitabine plus nab-paclitaxel per drug label. The other arm was with Tumor Treating Fields at 150 kHz for a recommendation for patients to wear it 18 hours per day.

The primary end point of the trial was OS, overall survival. The secondary end point included other efficacy landmarks such as local PFS, pain control, quality of life, and safety. And there was a post hoc that looked at distant PFS.

Dr. Shannon Westin: That's a pretty common secondary end point in pancreatic studies of looking at the pain-free interval. I thought that was really brilliant because, you know, I think in gyn cancers, we see resolution of symptoms as being a really big deal, but it's not necessarily something that we always look at. So I thought that was really nice that you included that.

Okay, talk to us a little bit about the population. So, the population that actually got treated in PANOVA-3 is pretty generalizable to what people are treating in the clinic.

Dr. Hani Babiker: So, in pancreatic cancer, unfortunately, most of our patients present, approximately 80%, with metastatic disease. Local is divided to resectable, borderline, and locally advanced. We studied this trial, a randomized trial, in locally advanced and unresectable, which is really an unmet need. Most of our patients with locally advanced and unresectable are grouped up with other trials in the metastatic setting without a focus on locally advanced and unresectable, save for a few trials. This year, a trial that we were looking for for a long time, the LAPLACE trial, unfortunately, that we were very excited about, this is a molecule that targeted connective tissue growth factor, that showed earlier efficacy in a randomized trial, did not meet up the median OS end point. And hence, PANOVA-3 is the first trial in locally advanced and unresectable that did meet its primary end point.

So, it's a very unmet need in locally advanced and unresectable. A lot of the times, our patients in clinic are treated with frontline chemotherapy that was studied in metastatic disease and locally advanced and unresectable, which include either FOLFIRINOX, NALIRIFOX, or gemcitabine/abraxane. I do have in my clinic multiple patients that would stay on the regimen for such a long time, and then we would have to devise a mechanism of maintenance, although this is not studied really in details, either with capecitabine or dropping the oxaliplatin to continue FOLFIRI. And then we also approach chemoradiotherapy. So the trial was in a disease in pancreatic cancer that really is an unmet need.

So the inclusion criteria included a patient with locally advanced and unresectable. These were done at multiple centers. Most of them academic centers were discussed at the tumor board, and if it's unresectable, they will be meeting specific metrics of appropriate liver function tests, kidney function tests, and blood counts. We excluded patients that obviously had, given that these are electric fields, patients that have, for example, stimulators or pacemakers, knowing that this could potentially affect some of these devices. But for the most part, it was locally advanced and unresectable patients with a very good performance status and good counts.

Dr. Shannon Westin: That's great. I think everyone's excited to hear about the primary outcome of overall survival. What did you find, and how does it compare to some of the recent trials?

Dr. Hani Babiker: We're very excited that it did meet its primary end point of median overall survival. It was very exciting knowing that a lot of us were disappointed a little bit of some of the trials that were presented at ASCO GI, such as the LAPLACE trial that I alluded to. Just before the presentation, the PRODIGE 29 trial that is in locally advanced and unresectable that randomized patients with locally advanced disease to either FOLFIRINOX or single-agent gemcitabine, allowing for a crossover, although it did meet its primary end point of PFS, there was no overall survival benefit. So that kind of got us a little bit disappointed, but having the PANOVA-3 trial being positive in median OS got us all excited.

In addition, the 12-year overall survival rate was increased in both the intention-to-treat and modified intention-to-treat. The modified intention-to-treat were patients that have had at least one cycle of therapy with TTFields daily and/or one cycle with chemotherapy, which was gemcitabine plus nab-paclitaxel. There was a trend to improvement in PFS and local PFS, although that did not have statistical significance, but the 12-year PFS rate in both the intention-to-treat and modified intention-to-treat was significant. For me, as one of the investigators, that told me that there might be a specific biomarker that would tell me that patients could respond greater than others, more exceptional than others, given that 12-month PFS rate was improved. On a post hoc analysis, the distant PFS was improved with the intervention of Tumor Treating Fields with gemcitabine plus nab-paclitaxel. In addition, there was an improvement in global health status and quality of life in addition to pain-free survival, which is a strong hurdle in our patients with pancreatic adenocarcinoma that most present with significant abdominal pain.

Dr. Shannon Westin: One of the other questions that I think has come up is around central review. So did you all use central review in this study?

Dr. Hani Babiker: Most of the centers were academic centers. These were discussed in tumor boards, which included radiation oncologists and surgeons. I wanted to point out that it's very important to note that the primary end point was overall survival. So the primary end point was not PFS. Hence, the central review would help us, for example, with elaborating and making sure patients were actually locally advanced disease, but in a setting where the primary end point is overall survival, that was the key point of the clinical trial. This trial was discussed at academic centers, and all included tumor boards to decide if patients were locally advanced or not. In the trial, there was a good proportion of patients, or percentage, that had a CA 19-9 more than 1000. That could indicate that potentially there are a fraction of patients that actually had metastatic disease, micrometastatic disease. So that could hint towards why the median OS was slightly lower then in both arms when compared to, for example, the trial that was presented at ASCO GI, the LAPLACE trial. However, having said that, we were very excited about the trial. It was the first positive trial in locally advanced and unresectable to meet median OS survival.

Dr. Shannon Westin: It's so awesome. So congratulations. Okay, so let's talk a little bit about your very detailed secondary end points because you had a lot of really prudent choices there. So anything that was interesting or informative in those end points?

Dr. Hani Babiker: One major hurdle back we have for most of our patients with pancreatic adenocarcinoma, like I mentioned earlier, is pain. We try to approach it, obviously, with narcotics. If it doesn't work, we try to do celiac axis block interventionally, and that sometimes is successful and sometimes is not. So actually, to see the pain-free survival end point to be met was very exciting for us. And as for me, as a scientist that studies TTFields in clinic and lab as also to develop a mechanism and understanding really how that works. That was very important for us that in addition to chemotherapy, it improved pain-free survival or deterioration of pain. And most importantly, our patients with pancreatic cancer, this disease is very aggressive. It affects quality of life of patients. Patients feel fatigued, tired. It's a procoagulant tumor that causes clots and strokes, etcetera, marantic endocarditis. And one big problem we deal with when we're seeing patients in clinic is obviously that quality of life. Although data have shown with treatment, with frontline regimens, that quality of life improves with treatment and chemotherapy, it's actually great to see that that improvement happens early in addition to Tumor Treating Fields.

The other interesting point was that it was not only pain and quality of life, but also digestive symptoms that are improved with this intervention, knowing that a lot of our patients do have pancreatic cancer, pancreatic exocrine insufficiency that affect also with digestion, and a lot of our patients have abdominal pain after eating and diarrhea. So it was interesting to see that also improved with the intervention.

Dr. Shannon Westin: You have touched a little bit on some of the adverse events, kind of with the TT mechanisms, but I'd love to hear a little bit more detail around adverse events in general in this study, as well as specific AEs related to the Tumor Treating Fields.

Dr. Hani Babiker: Absolutely. So when we compared both arms, there was a similar toxicity related to the regimen, mostly with chemotherapy, but in specifically to Tumor Treating Fields, there was a rash, and that included dermatitis and rash. Most of the side effects were grade 1 and grade 2. Grade 3 toxicities related to skin was less than 10%, approximately 7% to 8%, and hence did not affect many patients. But it was something to note, and it's something that in the future, when we develop a mechanism of treating patients to note early. We in our clinic have learned to treat patients in the clinical trial early with topical steroids to each patient, of shifting the arrays to mitigate some toxicity and rash. We do advise our patients in hot areas, we keep them aware that sweating, for example, can lead to higher conductivity of electrical fields with a predisposition for rash. So if there's an opportunity to stay in a little bit of a cold area, make sure that the arrays are shifted, use topical steroids early. If it's a significant rash, to hold treatment for at least 48 hours and speak to the investigators. And through these mechanisms, we have learned that we were able to mitigate the rash quite a bit.

Dr. Shannon Westin: That's awesome. Thank you so much. Yeah, I'm, it's summer right now, and I think- I'm in Texas, you're in Florida, like we know.

Okay, so I guess, again, you have been kind of touching on this, but I would love to know, like if in the quality-of-life assessments or if just in your discussions with patients, like how easy is this to use? How easy is the Tumor Treating Fields device to use, and what do patients really think?

Dr. Hani Babiker: Absolutely. We have learned that whenever we speak with patients, it's always good to discuss with them briefly the science of it. A lot of patients would want to know if it's interventional, is that something that goes, is delivered percutaneously or not, and we explain that these are delivered through arrays that are through the skin. We always touch base with them about a lot of question I get about mechanism of action and then about compliance. So I think one important thing to note is that compliance with the use of the device is a lot of the question we'll get quite a bit. Patients know there's going to take an effort from them, and some of my patients enjoyed it because they felt like they also are fighting the disease by wearing the device. I have learned very quickly that having a team, surrounded by a team that knew how to mitigate some of the side effects and knew how to explain how to use the device helped quite a bit. And this included some of our nurses and our nurse practitioners and our clinical research coordinators who've done a wonderful job of showing these arrays actually to patients before they start on the trial, look at it, know how it works.

The other point to know is that the sponsor provided Device Support Specialist, we call them DSS, they have been instrumental in helping us, helping the patients know how to use the device, how to use the generator, how to change the batteries, and that helped us conduct the trials and enroll very well. I would envision in the future with education and relying on the Device Support Specialist and having a team that knows how to use the device and mitigate some of the side effects will go a long way for patients to learn about this treatment. Many of the times our patients said while they are on the clinical trial felt like they are also being part of this team in applying the device and fighting the cancer.

Dr. Shannon Westin: That's awesome.

Well, I guess the bottom line. Is it ready for prime time? Is this something you are going to use for your patients in the clinic?

Dr. Hani Babiker: Absolutely. In a disease that has poor prognosis, and we are trying our best to find new treatments to fight this cancer and treatment modalities, presenting patients with all the treatment options that are out there would be recommended. It's what I would do it for in my clinic. And you know, it's funny that I am mentioning that right now. I had a patient who was seen internationally asking about the trial and the device and had locally advanced and unresectable before they start frontline treatment. I do think that there is going to be an educational piece. Obviously, this is not a pill, it's not an intravenous chemotherapy that we're very well and accustomed to. And some of us in academic centers know it very well. I usually joke that whenever I am talking about it in pancreatic cancer, if there is a radiation oncologist in the room, they will be like, "Yeah, we know all about it. We have been treating patients with GBM over there." So a lot of the times, when we first went to trial, if I had any questions, I would call them and ask them. So from their perspective, they, because they use it as a standard of care in treatment of GBM, they develop significant expertise in it. I think in the GI world, specifically and with oncologists that treat pancreatic cancer and specifically oncologists in the community, learning about the device and how to use it, how to recommend it, how to mitigate side effects, will be hopefully for prime time in the future.

Dr. Shannon Westin: That's great. Sounds like some real educational opportunities there.

Well, this has been awesome. Thank you so much, Dr. Babiker. I mean, I learned a ton, and I wish that we could find a way to use this in gynecologic cancers, but really, really just want to commend you on the design of the trial and the success in this really devastating disease.

So again, this was "Tumor Treating Fields with Gemcitabine and Nab-Paclitaxel for Locally Advanced Pancreatic Adenocarcinoma: A Randomized, Open-Label, Pivotal Phase III PANOVA-3 Study."

And as always, I am your host, Shannon Westin. Please go check out our other offerings wherever you get your podcasts and have an awesome day.

The purpose of this podcast is to educate and to inform. This is not a substitute for professional medical care and is not intended for use in the diagnosis or treatment of individual conditions.

Guests on this podcast express their own opinions, experience, and conclusions. Guest statements on the podcast do not express the opinions of ASCO. The mention of any product, service, organization, activity, or therapy should not be construed as an ASCO endorsement.

Dr. Babiker Disclosures

Consulting or Advisory Role: Endocyte, Celgene, Idera, Myovant Sciences, Novocure, Ipsen, Caris MPI, Incyte, Guardant Health

Speakers' Bureau: Guardant Health

Research Funding: Spirita Oncology, Novocure, AstraZeneca, JSI, Incyte, Qurient, HiFiBiO Therapeutics, Revolution Health Care, Elevation Oncology, Dragonfly Therapeutics, Zelbio, BMS, Mirati Therapeutics, Strategia

JCO fellow Dr. Ece Cali speaks with JCO Associate Editor Dr. Thomas E. Stinchcombe to discuss the JCO article "Phase 2 Dose-Randomized Study of Sunvozertinib in Platinum-Pretreated Non-Small-Cell Lung Cancer with Epidermal Growth Factor Receptor Exon 20 Insertion Mutations (WU-KONG1B)", that was simultaneously released at the IASLC 2025 World Conference on Lung Cancer.

TRANSCRIPT

Dr. Ece Cali: Hello, and welcome to our series where we cover some of the top JCO papers published simultaneously with their abstract presentation at this year's most important oncology meetings. I am your host, Dr. Ece Cali, JCO editorial fellow, and I am joined by Dr. Tom Stinchcombe, JCO associate editor, to discuss the Journal of Clinical Oncology article and 2025 World Conference on Lung Cancer abstract presentation, "Phase II Dose-Randomized Study of Sunvozertinib in Platinum-Pretreated Non–Small Cell Lung Cancer With EGFR Exon 20 Insertion Mutations."

The WU-KONG1B trial is a multinational, phase II study that investigated the efficacy and safety of different doses of sunvozertinib in patients with metastatic non-small cell lung cancer and EGFR exon 20 insertion mutations after progression on platinum based chemotherapy. Tom, before we dive into the results, could you walk us through the rationale for this study, and how does it fit into the current treatment options for patients with EGFR exon 20 insertion?

Dr. Tom Stinchcombe: Thank you, Dr. Cali. I think the clinical context is always important. We have known that EGFR exon 20 insertions exist and that they are resistant to our currently available EGFR tyrosine kinase inhibitors, and I think there have been attempts in the past to develop a tyrosine kinase inhibitor, but there is a very narrow therapeutic window between the dose you need to inhibit the EGFR mutation in the cancer and the EGFR receptor on normal tissues, most notably the mucosa, the gut, and the skin. And so, our previous attempts have failed largely because the dose required was not tolerable for patients and they could not really stay on the drug for a long time or they were not very active.

And so, I think there was a real desire to develop an EGFR tyrosine kinase inhibitor, and then, historically, the standard had been a platinum based doublet as the standard of care. And more recently, platinum based doublet with amivantamab has proven to be superior to platinum based chemotherapy alone. I think the context is also important that amivantamab is not necessarily available in all the countries, and so, there are patients who do not have access to amivantamab. Going to the rationale, I think that this drug had shown preliminary promise of having activity but without that being encumbered by those EGFR wild type toxicities, and, therefore, it was really explored in this larger study.

Dr. Ece Cali: And what are some key findings from this trial?

Dr. Tom Stinchcombe: So, I think that we should look at the study design. It is a little quirky, for lack of a better term, in that there is a randomization to 200 versus 300 mg, and then, there was a nonrandomized cohort of 300 mg. So, when you look at the study, if you are a purist, you will just look at the randomized patients. If you are sort of an aggregator, you look at all patients. So, it shows reporting on three cohorts, but I think the key findings are that the 200 mg and the 300 mg treatments had similar toxicities in terms of response rate, duration of response, and progression free survival. And as you know going through the review, there was a lot of queries from the reviewers as to which would be the preferred dose, and to me, I think this really illustrates a dose finding component to a trial design because there is a lot of debate about what the minimal effective dose is or the optimal dose. And in this case, having the two dose cohorts did provide us some valuable efficacy and toxicity information. And then, when I look at the study, I want to make sure it reflects my patient population, and about a quarter of patients had brain metastases, and about 15% had previous amivantamab, and about 5% to 10% had another EGFR tyrosine kinase inhibitor.

Dr. Ece Cali: And what is the objective response rate and the duration of response? These are pretty good numbers for this patient population.

Dr. Tom Stinchcombe: In the 200 mg cohort, it was about 46%. The duration of response was around 11 months, and the PFS was around 8 months. The 300 mg cohort was 46%, duration of response 9.8, and the median PFS is 6.9 months, and I think that this is greater activity than we have seen with our previous attempts at EGFR tyrosine kinase inhibitors.

Dr. Ece Cali: And based on these data, FDA granted accelerated approval for sunvozertinib very recently at 200 mg once daily dosing in this setting. So, that is a major step forward for our patients. Dr. Stinchcombe, how does this impact your clinical practice, and what side effects should oncologists be watching for if they prescribe this medication?

Dr. Tom Stinchcombe: So, I think it was very interesting that they chose the 200 mg dose, which I think was more tolerable, and when we kind of look at this, there still was a rate of diarrhea, all grade, rash, paronychia, which are the EGFR related toxicities. There can be some decreased appetite, stomatitis, and then, it can lead to some lab abnormalities, like increased CPK and creatinine that physicians have to be aware of.

You know, how it will affect my practice is that all these patients had received a platinum based chemotherapy as the first line therapy. I think that this would become my preferred second line therapy for patients outside the context of a trial because of the activity and the tolerability.

Dr. Ece Cali: And lastly, several other tyrosine kinase inhibitors are being evaluated for EGFR exon 20 insertion, including in the frontline setting. So, what are some of the outstanding questions in this space, and what data should our listeners keep an eye on moving forward?

Dr. Tom Stinchcombe: I think you are right that now, there is going to be another EGFR tyrosine kinase that may become available in the next year, and there is another drug, furmonertinib, that is being investigated.

I think, for the clinical question, is, well, can we move these into the first line setting? And actually, the development path has two ways of doing this. There is EGFR tyrosine kinase compared to platinum based chemotherapy, and then, platinum based chemotherapy with an EGFR tyrosine kinase versus platinum based chemotherapy, and both have their merits and strengths. And so, I think it is going to be very interesting as we see if those first line trials, one, can they be demonstrated to be superior to platinum based chemotherapy, and then by what magnitude and what the side effects are. But I think we are hoping that in the next couple of years, we will have an additional first line option for our patients.

Dr. Ece Cali: Yeah, it is always great to have more options for our patients.

Thank you, Dr. Stinchcombe, for speaking about the JCO article, "Phase II Dose-Randomized Study of Sunvozertinib in Platinum-Pretreated Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer With EGFR Exon 20 Insertion Mutations."

Join us again for the latest JCO simultaneous publications. Please take a moment to rate, review, and subscribe to all ASCO podcast shows at asco.org/podcasts. Until then, enjoy the rest of World Lung Conference.

The purpose of this podcast is to educate and to inform. This is not a substitute for professional medical care and is not intended for use in the diagnosis or treatment of individual conditions.

Guests on this podcast express their own opinions, experience, and conclusions. Guest statements on the podcast do not express the opinions of ASCO. The mention of any product, service, organization, activity, or therapy should not be construed as an ASCO endorsement.