ASCO: You’re listening to a podcast from Cancer.Net. This cancer information website is produced by the American Society of Clinical Oncology, known as ASCO, the world’s leading professional organization for doctors who care for people with cancer. The purpose of this podcast is to educate and to inform. This is not a substitute for professional medical care and is not intended for use in the diagnosis or treatment of individual conditions. Guests on this podcast express their own opinions, experience, and conclusions. Guests’ statements on this podcast do not express the opinions of ASCO. The mention of any product, service, organization, activity, or therapy should not be construed as an ASCO endorsement. Cancer research discussed in this podcast is ongoing, so data described here may change as research progresses. In this podcast, Dr. Christopher Flowers covers highlights from the 2021 American Society of Hematology Annual Meeting, held December 11 to 14 in Atlanta, Georgia. He discusses new treatments for diffuse large B-cell lymphoma, advances in immunotherapy, and a session on improving inclusivity in clinical trials. Dr. Flowers is the Chair of the Department of Lymphoma/Myeloma at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center and was appointed Division Head ad interim of Cancer Medicine in August 2020. He is also the 2022 Cancer.Net Associate Editor for Lymphoma.   View Dr. Flowers’ disclosures at Cancer.Net. Dr. Flowers: Hello. I'm Dr. Christopher Flowers, Chair of the Department of Lymphoma and Myeloma and Interim Division Head for Cancer Medicine at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. And it's my pleasure to talk to you today about the highlights from this year's American Society of Hematology meeting. The ASH meeting this year was a very exciting meeting for lymphoma broadly across all of the lymphomas, with particular highlights around diffuse large B-cell lymphoma where there were some changes that may be changes in the standard of care in the year ahead. I was involved in one of these studies, the POLARIX study that I'll spend some time talking about, where I was the North American lead, and I've served as a consultant for Genentech-Roche in the conduct of that study and other studies related to drugs in their portfolio. The other set of studies that I will talk about are the studies around CAR T-cell therapy. And 2 of those studies, Dr. Jason Weston from my institution and MD Anderson were involved with and Dr. Weston was the senior leader on 2 of those 3 studies that I will talk about. So let's first talk about the first line in diffuse large B-cell lymphoma. Diffuse large B-cell lymphoma, as many of you may be aware of, is the most common type of lymphoma and the most common type of aggressive lymphoma. Back in the 1970s and 80s, the standard of care for CHOP therapy was developed. And that through the 90s, through a number of comparisons of clinical trials for chemotherapy, emerged as the de facto standard of care. In early 2000, the drug rituximab, the anti-CD20 antibody therapy, so our first form of immunotherapy, was added to CHOP. And R-CHOP therapy became the standard of care around 2002. And so it's really been about 20 years that that has been the standard of care for all patients or for most patients in the front line for diffuse large B-cell lymphoma. That's not been without challenges. There have been a number of clinical trials from 2002 to the present that have challenged R-CHOP, either by adding new therapies, like new targeted therapies looking at intensifying the CD20 antibody component, adding things like stem cell transplant or intensifying the chemotherapy-- and in some cases, focusing on subsets of diffuse large B-cell lymphoma, like the activated B-cell-like subset that are at poorer outcomes in the general population. However, none of those clinical trials really emerged to change the standard of care. And R-CHOP had remained the standard of care for patients. This yea