Article
Author: Park, Julie E. ; Oberic, Lucie ; Zinzani, Pier Luigi ; Fischer, Luca ; Vilmar, Adam ; Jimenez-Ubieto, Ana ; Thieblemont, Catherine ; Gine, Eva ; Reitan, John ; Ohler, Anke ; Salles, Gilles ; Lambert, Jonathan ; Nunes, Ana ; Stilgenbauer, Stephan ; Zilioli, Vittorio Ruggero ; Jerkeman, Mats ; Wade, Sally W. ; Sancho, Juan-Manuel ; Keeping, Sam ; Hess, Georg ; Wu, James J. ; Dreyling, Martin ; Chen, Jenny M. H. ; Linton, Kim ; Eyre, Toby A.
The SCHOLAR-2 retrospective study highlighted poor overall survival (OS) with standard of care (SOC) regimens among patients with relapsed/refractory (R/R) mantle cell lymphoma (MCL) who failed a covalent Bruton tyrosine kinase inhibitor (BTKi). In the ZUMA-2 single-arm trial, brexucabtagene autoleucel (brexu-cel; autologous anti-CD19 CAR T-cell therapy) demonstrated high rates of durable responses in patients with R/R MCL who had previous BTKi exposure. Here, we compared OS in ZUMA-2 and SCHOLAR-2 using three different methods which adjusted for imbalances in prognostic factors between populations: inverse probability weighting (IPW), regression adjustment (RA), and doubly robust (DR). Brexu-cel was associated with improved OS compared to SOC across all unadjusted and adjusted comparisons. Hazard ratios (95% confidence intervals) were 0.38 (0.23, 0.61) for IPW, 0.45 (0.28, 0.74) for RA, and 0.37 (0.23, 0.59) for DR. These results suggest a substantial survival benefit with brexu-cel versus SOC in patients with R/R MCL after BTKi exposure.