Highlighting Insights From the Marginal Zone Lymphoma Workshop

Following the 2024 Marginal Zone Lymphoma (MZL) Workshop, CancerNetwork® spoke with multiple attending clinicians about insights they shared regarding the disease state, covering the significance of the workshop and its contribution to advancing research in areas such as prognostic factors and managing adverse events (AEs) related to the disease.

Thomas Habermann, MD, professor of Medicine at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, member of the Lymphoma Research Foundation’s Scientific Advisory Board, and MZL Workshop co-chair, spoke about the significance of the MZL Workshop. He highlighted the complexity of these types of diseases, which he believed warranted the establishment of the group.

According to Habermann, MZL is a “heterogenous group of disorders” that most contemporaries in the field “don’t quite appreciate.”

Next, Julie M. Vose, MD, MBA, George and Peggy Payne chair in oncology and chief of Hematology and Oncology at the University of Nebraska Medical Center, and co-editor-in-chief of ONCOLOGY®, spoke about how the MZL Workshop contributes to advancing research and improving outcomes for patients with MZL. She emphasized a need to be more inclusive when enrolling patients with MZL in clinical trials.

Then, James R. Cerhan, MD, PhD, professor of Epidemiology at the Mayo Clinic College of Medicine and Science, and Ralph S. and Beverly Caulkins Professor of Cancer Research, spoke about addressing research questions in MZL epidemiology to further disease understanding. He emphasized a need to further study newly identified risk factors of the disease, as well as identifying new treatment targets for patients with MZL.

Additionally, Alexandar Tzankov, MD, surgical pathologist and head of the Department of Histopathology and Autopsy at the Institute of Medical Genetics and Pathology at University Hospital Basel, and chair for the European Bone Marrow Working Group, discussed how prognostic factors for MZL may influence treatment. He described how the limited number of studies done with relatively small subsets of patients makes prognoses challenging, as prognostic factors have not been sufficiently explored.

Finally, Andrew D. Zelenetz, MD, PhD, medical director of Quality Informatics at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, outlined challenges related to AE management of treatments for MZL. He emphasized that safety management practices for MZL are comparable with other B-cell lymphomas, suggesting that use of bridging therapy for CAR T cells and step-up dosing for bispecific antibodies may help with mitigating AEs.