Dr Evens on Personalizing Therapy for Patients with Hodgkin Lymphoma

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EP: 1.Dr Evens on Personalizing Therapy for Patients with Hodgkin Lymphoma

EP: 2.Dr Evens Discusses New Prognostic Model for Early-Stage Hodgkin Lymphoma

EP: 3.Predictive Model Aims to Personalize Hodgkin Lymphoma Treatment

In an interview, Andrew Evens, DO, MBA, MSc, discusses the HOLISTIC consortium, which aims to gather and harmonize global Hodgkin lymphoma data from clinical trials and registries to improve individualized treatment decisions and predict long-term outcomes for patients, especially considering their young age and potential late effects from therapy.

The large consortium called HOLISTIC, which stands for Hodgkin Lymphoma International Study for Individual Care, started in 2018 with the goal of harmonizing and synthesizing all of the world's data on Hodgkin lymphoma.

As Evens, deputy director for clinical services and chief physician officer, Rutgers Cancer Institute and Jack & Sheryl Morris Cancer Center, explains, Hodgkin lymphoma is a cancer that is highly treatable and curable. It is most common in younger patients, typically in their 20s and 30s, though it can occur in those over 60. There are many different treatment options rather than one single "best" way. However, for younger patients who are cured, there can be long-term issues known as postacute or late effects. These can arise 10, 20, or even 30 years after treatment due to chemotherapy or radiation, even after the cancer is gone.

While clinical trials are excellent for evaluating new drugs and treatments, they often have limited follow-up periods (eg, 3 to 5 years), which isn't long enough to observe these late effects. However, cancer registries provide real-world data and follow patients for decades, including those who may not qualify for clinical trials.

Evens explains that the aim of his research was to bring all this information together, to "knit this tapestry of the world's data." Over the past 8 years, over 30,000 individual patient cases have been gathered. These are detailed original cases compiled from the most significant clinical trials in the field over the last 15 years, as well as from long-term registries.

This helps patients and providers understand individual cases and scenarios based on hundreds, if not thousands, of previous examples and illustrates the likely outcomes of different treatment options in both the short term (a few years) and potentially decades down the road, without advocating for one "best" treatment.

Ultimately, this initiative represents a form of individualized medicine, using clinical data to predict and personalize therapy more effectively.