@article{LiebersDuellFitzgeraldetal.2021, author = {Liebers, Nora and Duell, Johannes and Fitzgerald, Donnacha and Kerkhoff, Andrea and Noerenberg, Daniel and Kaebisch, Eva and Acker, Fabian and Fuhrmann, Stephan and Leng, Corinna and Welslau, Manfred and Chemnitz, Jens and Middeke, Jan-Moritz and Weber, Thomas and Holtick, Udo and Trappe, Ralf and Pfannes, Roald and Liersch, Ruediger and Spoer, Christian and Fuxius, Stefan and Gebauer, Niklas and Caill{\´e}, L{\´e}andra and Geer, Thomas and Koenecke, Christian and Keller, Ulrich and Claus, Rainer and Mougiakakos, Dimitrios and Mayer, Stephanie and Huettmann, Andreas and Pott, Christiane and Trummer, Arne and Wulf, Gerald and Brunnberg, Uta and Bullinger, Lars and Hess, Georg and Mueller-Tidow, Carsten and Glass, Bertram and Lenz, Georg and Dreger, Peter and Dietrich, Sascha}, title = {Polatuzumab vedotin as a salvage and bridging treatment in relapsed or refractory large B-cell lymphomas}, series = {Blood Advances}, volume = {5}, journal = {Blood Advances}, doi = {10.1182/bloodadvances.2020004155}, url = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-369173}, pages = {2707-2716}, year = {2021}, abstract = {The antibody-drug conjugate polatuzumab vedotin (pola) has recently been approved in combination with bendamustine and rituximab (pola-BR) for patients with refractory or relapsed (r/r) large B-cell lymphoma (LBCL). To investigate the efficacy of pola-BR in a real-world setting, we retrospectively analyzed 105 patients with LBCL who were treated in 26 German centers under the national compassionate use program. Fifty-four patients received pola as a salvage treatment and 51 patients were treated with pola with the intention to bridge to chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapy (n = 41) or allogeneic hematopoietic cell transplantation (n = 10). Notably, patients in the salvage and bridging cohort had received a median of 3 prior treatment lines. In the salvage cohort, the best overall response rate was 48.1\%. The 6-month progression-free survival and overall survival (OS) was 27.7\% and 49.6\%, respectively. In the bridging cohort, 51.2\% of patients could be successfully bridged with pola to the intended CAR T-cell therapy. The combination of pola bridging and successful CAR T-cell therapy resulted in a 6-month OS of 77.9\% calculated from pola initiation. Pola vedotin-rituximab without a chemotherapy backbone demonstrated encouraging overall response rates up to 40\%, highlighting both an appropriate alternative for patients unsuitable for chemotherapy and a new treatment option for bridging before leukapheresis in patients intended for CAR T-cell therapy. Furthermore, 7 of 12 patients with previous failure of CAR T-cell therapy responded to a pola-containing regimen. These findings suggest that pola may serve as effective salvage and bridging treatment of r/r LBCL patients.}, language = {en} }