Tislelizumab for the treatment of classical Hodgkin's lymphoma

Classical Hodgkin's lymphoma (cHL) is an unusual lymphoid neoplasm, and nearly 50% of patients still relapse after standard therapy. Programmed cell death protein 1 (PD-1) signaling plays a vital in the progression of cHL. Anti-PD-1 antibodies such as nivolumab and pembrolizumab have thus been approved to treat relapsed/refractory (R/R) cHL. Tislelizumab is a humanized IgG4 monoclonal anti-PD-1 antibody. In contrast to other anti-PD-1 antibodies, the Fc fragment of tislelizumab was engineered to improve the efficacy of PD-1 antibody to a certain extent. In the phase II, open-label, single-arm, multicenter study (ClinicalTrials.gov Identifier NCT03209973), tislelizumab proved its efficacy and safety as a new PD-1 inhibitor to treat Chinese patients with R/R cHL, with a high overall response rate of 87.1% including complete response in 62.9% enrolled patients. Both the median progression-free survival and the median duration of overall response were not reached. In this monograph, we have reviewed the main preclinical and clinical findings in the study of tislelizumab for the treatment of R/R cHL.