Brexucabtagene autoleucel: a breakthrough in the treatment of mantle cell lymphoma
Anagha Deshpande, Yucai Wang, Javier Muñoz, Preetesh Jain
Abstract
In July 2020, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved brexucabtagene autoleucel (BA), the first anti-CD19 chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapy for the treatment of relapsed/refractory mantle cell lymphoma (MCL). The pivotal ZUMA-2 trial led to the approval of BA in patients who experienced relapsed disease on prior therapies (chemotherapy and/or Bruton tyrosine kinase [BTK] inhibitors). The FDA approval of BA was based on excellent responses with this therapy in highly refractory patients with MCL, who conventionally had poor outcomes. Longer follow-up data from the ZUMA-2 study have been presented at recent international meetings. As is common with other CAR T-cell therapies in lymphomas, the main toxicities of BA therapy included cytokine release syndrome (CRS), infections, cytopenias and CAR-associated neurotoxicity. In this review, we provide a summary of the data in the development of BA and its impact on MCL patient survival and future directions.