ADC Therapeutics pauses Zynlonta trial enrollment after seven patient deaths, five serious safety events

ADC Ther­a­peu­tics said Tues­day morn­ing that it was stop­ping en­roll­ment in a study of Zyn­lon­ta af­ter sev­en pa­tients with dif­fuse large B cell lym­phoma died from res­pi­ra­to­ry prob­lems fol­low­ing treat­ment.

In the Phase II tri­al, dubbed LO­TIS-9, ADC Ther­a­peu­tics was study­ing Zyn­lon­ta plus rit­ux­imab in 40 pa­tients who were con­sid­ered frail and un­fit and could not re­ceive the full course of a stan­dard com­bi­na­tion of chemother­a­py called R-CHOP. But dur­ing a re­cent da­ta re­view, the com­pa­ny flagged that there were ex­ces­sive res­pi­ra­to­ry-re­lat­ed safe­ty events, in­clud­ing sev­en pa­tient deaths and five grade 3 or 4 events — near­ly one-third of the tri­al par­tic­i­pants.

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