Is Step-up Dosing Recommended for DLBCL Treatment with Epcoritamab?

Julie Vose, MD, MBA, of the University of Nebraska Medical Center, discussed the abstract she will be presenting at the 2023 American Society of Hematology Annual Meeting and Exposition (ASH), titled, “Mitigating the Risk of Cytokine Release Syndrome (CRS): Preliminary Results from a DLBCL Cohort of Epcore NHL-1.”

The study evaluated the use of epcoritamab in patients with diffuse large B-cell lymphoma (DLBCL) through an optimization cohort, in which patients received steroid pre-administration before the first several doses, then subsequently received step-up dosing. Patients achieved a decreased CRS with this approach.

“The step-up dosing is now what’s going to be recommended for patients in trying to treat them for [DLBCL] with epcoritamab,” Dr. Vose explained. “I think this is a very important outcome for this patient population, especially if we can do this with outpatient therapy and fairly comfortable with minimal toxicity. I see that this is a big improvement for patients using this bispecific antibody.”

Finally, Dr. Vose mentioned that future studies will try to combine epcoritamab with other chemotherapies, biologic agents, or pathway directed therapies to determine if it can increase the response rate compared with epcoritamab monotherapy.

“Over the next few years, we’ll be seeing a lot of combination therapies, particularly probably earlier in the course of the disease for patients with different subtypes of lymphoma,” she concluded.