While the personalized approach has dramatically improved outcomes for many patients with non-Hodgkin B-cell lymphoma (a blood cancer that develops in immune cells called B cells), the same is not true for patients with a rarer type of lymphoma that originates from immune cells called T cells.
Peripheral T-cell lymphomas consist of a variety of blood cancers with unique biology, and survival rates vary widely. Dr. Jia Luan, a lymphoma expert and professor of clinical medicine at Weill Cornell Medical College, and her collaborators are working to change that.
We previously thought we could treat all non-Hodgkin lymphomas with a one-size-fits-all model. We are learning that we need to develop personalized diagnostic, therapeutic, and prognostic models for T-cell lymphoma. ”
Dr. Jia Ruan, member of the Sandra Edward Meyer Cancer Center at Weill Cornell Medicine and hematologist/oncologist at NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center
Dr. Luan and his colleagues, who co-lead the Multicenter Lymphoma Epidemiology and Outcomes (LEO) Consortium’s T-Cell Lymphoma Working Group with Mayo Clinic’s Dr. Andrew Feldman, have helped uncover new insights about peripheral T-cell lymphoma that may lead to customized care approaches.
“The groundbreaking research we recently published from a real-world perspective has helped us understand what happens to the majority of T-cell lymphoma patients who receive traditional chemotherapy-based treatments,” said Dr. Ruan. “This can serve as a benchmark to identify unmet needs and determine what the clinical development strategy should be.”
We spoke with Dr. Ruan to learn more about her research and how she thinks it can help lymphoma patients.
How has Weill Cornell Medicine collaborated with other centers to advance lymphoma treatment?
Weill Cornell has been a member of the LEO Consortium, which brings together eight major U.S. medical centers with expertise in treating lymphoma, since its creation in 2015 with funding from the National Cancer Institute. The goal is to build and maintain a large, diverse, prospective cohort of patients with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and to identify new clinical, epidemiologic, genetic, tumor, and treatment factors that influence patient outcomes.
How is the LEO Consortium contributing to addressing challenges related to peripheral T-cell lymphoma specifically?
The perfect resource for rare diseases like peripheral T-cell lymphoma. We will mobilize multicenter, multidisciplinary resources to build a database large enough to drill down into the details of each of the more than 30 subtypes of this disease. In small datasets, analyzing subtypes can quickly split and dilute the sample size, making it difficult to ask questions about subtype-specific disease factors and treatment patterns. We can conduct real-world outcome analysis across different disease subtypes to identify where the need lies, whether it’s understanding the biology, developing more effective treatments, or addressing lack of access to care.
What have you learned so far?
By focusing on the >700 peripheral T-cell lymphoma patients within the LEO cohort, we were able to track the evolution of care from initial treatment over the past 20 years. In general, we found that the backbone of treatment remained quite constant. It is a chemotherapy regimen developed for patients with B-cell non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma called CHOP (cyclophosphamide, doxorubicin hydrochloride, vincristine sulfate, prednisone). Over time, our knowledge of the biology and classification of peripheral T-cell lymphomas has deepened, and the list of new targeted agents with clinical activity in T-cell lymphomas has expanded, setting the stage for advances in biologically-based therapies.
How do you think we can improve care for these patient populations?
We hope to build beyond the CHOP backbone and develop initial treatments tailored to specific subtypes. More importantly, we want to introduce new drugs that target specific biological targets. LEO cohort data can be used to monitor the real-world impact of targeted agents such as the anti-CD30 antibody drug conjugate brentuximab vedotin (BV) and other agents offered in clinical trials and clinical settings. Although the anaplastic large cell lymphoma subtype is beginning to show improvement trends with the new drug BV, the sample size of patients receiving new treatments within the current analysis remains too small. We expect additional analyzes to confirm these trends as the LEO cohort grows and matures. For most other subtypes, we hope to find treatments that can be introduced to improve outcomes based on biological biomarkers.
What are the next steps for the LEO Consortium’s peripheral T-cell lymphoma research?
We want to investigate whether biological differences underlie differences in outcomes. The next step is to develop state-of-the-art multi-omics characterization of tumor biospecimens, including genomics, transcriptomics, and tumor-microenvironment interaction signals, which will provide a deeper understanding of potential targets for new treatments. The new data will guide how patients are treated and the order in which new drugs are given, based on their mutational profile in addition to their clinical prognostic score. It may also help develop accurate prognostic models for patient care.
What are the next steps for your research?
We will continue to participate in LEO and recruit patients to the study. We are collaborating with Mayo Clinic to coordinate and lead LEO T-cell lymphoma multi-omics analysis using banked specimens. We also plan to work with colleagues to develop new treatments and test them in clinical trials. We want to accelerate the introduction of new treatments to patient populations.
What does your team at Weill Cornell University hope to bring to patients as we explore this new frontier in peripheral T-cell lymphoma treatment?
Weill Cornell Medicine is well-positioned for this type of cutting-edge, interdisciplinary, collaborative approach. The company continues to collaborate with a specialist hematopathology team led by Dr. Giorgio Inghirami and translational scientists at the England Institute for Precision Medicine, led by Dr. Olivier Element, who have extensive experience in developing molecular therapeutic and prognostic models for a variety of lymphomas. Now we want to leverage that expertise against peripheral T-cell lymphoma.
Our clinical research team has helped bring many new treatments to patients in clinical trials, long before they were approved as standard of care. The company recently announced results from a Phase 2 study testing a chemotherapy-free treatment approach in people newly diagnosed with mantle cell lymphoma, a rare and aggressive subtype of non-Hodgkin B-cell lymphoma. Promising results support new combination therapies as front-line treatment of the disease. We hope to continue to provide this type of cutting-edge treatment by offering improved treatments to patients with peripheral T-cell lymphoma.
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Reference magazines:
Luan, J. others. (2026). Treatment patterns and clinical outcomes in systemic peripheral T-cell lymphoma: LEO-MER prospective cohort study. Blood Advances. DOI: 10.1182/bloodadvances.2025018455. https://ashpublications.org/bloodadvances/article/doi/10.1182/bloodadvances.2025018455/566660/Patterns-of-Care-and-Clinical-Outcomes-in-Systemic
