Study shows promise of precision medicine for most common type of lymphoma

Monday, July 20, 2015

A clinical trial has shown that patients with a specific molecular subtype of diffuse large B-cell lymphoma (DLBCL) are more likely to respond to the drug ibrutinib (Imbruvica) than patients with another molecular subtype of the disease. The study appeared online July 20, 2015, in Nature Medicine.

In this phase II trial, patients with the activated B-cell-like (ABC) subtype of DLBCL were more likely to respond to ibrutinib than patients with the germinal center B-cell-like (GCB) subtype of DLBCL. The trial was jointly conducted by the National Cancer Institute (NCI), which is part of the National Institutes of Health, and Pharmacyclics, Sunnyvale, California.