Efficiency and Safety of Brentuximab Vedotine as a Salvage Treatment Before Autologous Stem Cell Transplantation in Patients With Relapsed or Refractory Classic Hodgkin Lymphoma: Retrospective Study.

Background: There is no strong evidence supporting brentuximab vedotine (BV) efficacy as a salvage regimen for relapsed/refractory Hodgkin's lymphoma (R/R HL) patients before autologous hematopoietic cell transplantation (auto-HCT). Methods: We performed multicenter retrospective analysis of efficiency of treatment with the BV monotherapy as salvage regimen versus standard salvage chemotherapy (sCT) in 44 patients with R/R HL from a high-risk group. Results: Twenty-six patients (59.1%) had primary refractory disease. Nineteen patients (43.2%) received BV salvage treatment before auto-HCT, and 12 (63.6%) achieved complete response (CR) that counts 27.3% of the whole study cohort. There was no difference in the CR rate, 2-year progression-free survival, and 2-year overall survival after BV salvage and sCT (63.2% vs. 60%, respectively, Conclusions: The BV as a salvage treatment showed quite high efficiency. Despite a worse clinical characteristic of the BV group, there were no significant differences in the outcomes of the auto-HCT with respect to the salvage regimen (BV versus sCT) used before auto-HCT. Our results suggest that BV before auto-HCT in patients refractory to standard 2nd line treatment equalizes their prognosis to the patient sensitive to standard CT with the same tolerance and toxicity.