The Promise of ALLO-501A in Relapsed/Refractory LBCL

Michael T. Tees, MD, an associate member physician at the Colorado Blood Cancer Institute and part of the Lymphoid and Autoimmune Disease Groups, discusses the data behind ALLO-501A, an allogeneic chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapy.

ALLO-501A is being investigated in the phase 1 ALPHA trial (NCT03939026) and phase 1 ALPHA2 (NCT04416984) trial, which both include patients with relapsed/refractory large B-cell lymphoma (LBCL). According to Tees, the preliminary data for this drug were encouraging. The drug has demonstrated both preliminary efficacy and tolerable safety, says Tees. Events of both neurotoxicity and cytokine release syndrome (CRS) were low grade and occurred at lower rates compared with other CAR T-cell therapies, says Tees.

Transcript:

0:08 | The preliminary data is exciting. It's showing comparable efficacy with many products that are currently available for patients. I think that's promising and allows many of us to be comfortable with thinking of using this on our patients in the future. Assuming efficacy is as we would want it to be and safety signals are even better, which are already safe, this may lead to an FDA approval at some point. There might also be a different patient population that we would need to use this product. For example, it may be better for a patient that has highly refractory disease and cannot wait to consider an autologous product using their own cells.

1:22 | The safety signals are what's exciting to me. We saw low-grade neurotoxicity and I think that's a promising outcome right there. CRS is another big risk factor with CAR T cells, but those signals are also much lower than what would be expected from an autologous product, so that's exciting as well. Another thing that we’ve been watching closely is infection. Now, there is an added theoretical risk of viral reactivation such as cytomegalovirus and Epstein-Barr virus.