W Therapeutics (HKEx: 2126), an independent and innovative biotechnology company focused on developing, manufacturing and commercializing cell immunotherapy products, announced that the Center for Drug Evaluation (CDE) of the National Medical Products Administration of China (NMPA) granted Breakthrough Therapy Designation for Carteyva^® (relmacabtagene autoleucel injection) as second-line treatment in adults with relapsed or refractory large B-cell lymphoma (r/r LBCL) . Carteyva^® is an anti-CD19 autologous chimeric antigen receptor T (CAR-T) cell immunotherapy product independently developed by JW Therapeutics.

The Breakthrough Therapy Designation was supported by the results from the clinical study aimed to assess the efficacy and safety of Carteyva^® in Chinese adults with r/r LBCL who were not intended for autologous stem cell transplantation after failure of first-line therapy. This is the first clinical result obtained in Chinese patients.

Large B-cell lymphoma is a highly aggressive non-Hodgkin's lymphoma and is the most common subtype of lymphoma in adults. LBCL is a potentially curable disease, but 30-40% of patients still experience refractory or relapse¹. Patients who fail first-line treatment have a poor outcome, and although conventional treatment options such as high-dose chemotherapy followed by autologous haematopoietic stem cell transplantation (HDCT/ASCT) are the standard of care, approximately more than half of the patients are not suitable for ASCT due to a variety of reasons such as advanced age, comorbidities, and so on, and there is no standard of care with a very poor outcome². There are still urgent unmet medical needs to develop additional active therapeutic approaches for the treatment of r/r LBCL.