Top Five Stories of 2023

To celebrate and reflect on the end of the year, the Blood Cancers Today team gathered the top five most read articles published in 2023.

1. CAR-T Versus Bispecific Antibodies in Multiple Myeloma: Which Is the Better Option for Patients?

This year saw two US Food and Drug Administration approvals for the treatment of multiple myeloma (MM), elranatamab and talquetamab, both bispecific antibodies. Associate Editor Thomas Martin, MD, of the University of California Helen Diller Cancer Center, debates Saad Usmani, MD, of the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, over which is the superior therapy when it comes to treating patients with MM: chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cells or bispecific antibodies.

2. An Unclear Path: What’s the Best Route After CAR-T Failure in B-Cell Lymphoma?

In an era of multiple treatment options, clinicians face the complex decision of determining the optimal sequence of therapies for diseases such as aggressive B-cell lymphoma, where durable complete responses are rare. These challenging outcomes underscore the urgent need for tailored treatment approaches for this group of patients. Current guidelines fall short of establishing a clear standard of care. Associate Editor Kami Maddocks, MD, of the Ohio State University, and others offer insights and analysis in this comprehensive feature.

3. Prognostic Tools Need Updates to Recognize High-Risk Features in Lower-Risk MDS

The presence of high-risk features in ostensibly low-risk cases presents a dilemma, as current prognostic scoring systems for MDS may not capture key variables that impact risk and treatment outcomes in patients with lower-risk MDS.

Amy DeZern, MD, MHS, and William Brian Dalton, MD, PhD, of the Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center and the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, respectively, argue for the pivotal recognition of high-risk characteristics within lower-risk MDS in a perspective published in Expert Review of Hematology.

Management of lower-risk disease is “generally conservative,” and “underestimating the risk of progression may miss the optimal time to initiate more aggressive treatments,” they wrote in the article.

4. The Post-POLARIX Trial Era: Polatuzumab Vedotin Shifts DLBCL Treatment

Coming in at number four on the list is not a written piece but a podcast episode from The HemOnc Pulse. In it, Jonathan Friedberg, MD, MMSc, a hematologic oncologist at the University of Rochester Medicine’s Wilmot Cancer Institute, joins host Chadi Nabhan, MD, MBA, FACP,  to discuss the subtle but important shift in the treatment landscape of diffuse large B-cell lymphoma (DLBCL) in the post-POLARIX trial era.

“I think that this was a robustly done randomized, placebo-controlled trial that showed a small but clinically significant benefit as far as progression-free survival in patients with an [International Prognostic Index] score of two and above [in] large B-cell lymphoma,” he said during the episode.

5. Is It Time for a Unified Approach to MDS? 

Blood Cancers Today goes on a quest to figure out if the World Health Organization and the International Consensus Classification MDS classifications are really all that different after all. Spoiler alert: they are not.