Personalized treatments have improved outcomes for many people with non-Hodgkin B-cell lymphomas, but similar advances have not yet reached those with rarer T-cell lymphomas. Lymphoma specialist Dr. Jia Ruan, professor of clinical medicine at Weill Cornell Medicine, and her collaborators are working to address this gap, according to an April 9 announcement.
Peripheral T-cell lymphomas are a group of diverse blood cancers that differ biologically from other types and have widely varying survival rates. This makes it difficult to develop effective treatments. Dr. Ruan co-leads the T-cell lymphoma Working Group within the multi-center Lymphoma Epidemiology of Outcomes (LEO) Consortium alongside Dr. Andrew Feldman of Mayo Clinic. Their research aims to better understand these rare diseases and pave the way for more tailored care.
"The real-world perspective landmark study we recently published helped us understand what to expect with the majority of T-cell lymphoma patients who are treated with conventional chemotherapy-based treatment," Dr. Ruan said. "That provides a benchmark and allows us to identify unmet needs and determine what our clinical development strategy should be." She explained that by tracking over 700 patients in the LEO cohort, they observed that most still receive CHOP chemotherapy—originally developed for B-cell lymphomas—even as knowledge about peripheral T-cell lymphoma biology has grown.
Dr. Ruan said new targeted therapies such as brentuximab vedotin show promise in certain subtypes like anaplastic large cell lymphoma, though more data is needed before broader conclusions can be drawn: "We are starting to see a trend of improvement with the new agent BV in the subtype of anaplastic large cell lymphoma, but the sample size ... remains too small." The consortium plans further studies using advanced techniques like genomics and transcriptomics on tumor samples to find better treatment targets.
Weill Cornell's team is also collaborating closely across disciplines—including pathology and precision medicine—to advance care options through clinical trials and research partnerships. "Our clinical research team has helped to bring many new therapies to our patients in clinical trial settings, and well before they become approved as standard of care," Dr. Ruan said.
Looking ahead, researchers hope their work will lead not only to better treatments but also precision prognostic models based on biological markers: "It may also help us to develop precision prognostic models for patient care." As participation in studies grows and more data becomes available, experts anticipate improved therapies will reach patients facing these challenging forms of cancer.
