Generalizability of landmark clinical trials in diffuse large B cell lymphoma to real-world patients: a single-center retrospective cohort study.

We hypothesized that "real world" patients with DLBCL differ from clinical trial populations with trial eligibility excluding the poor-outcome patients who might benefit most from novel therapies. A total of 329 patients were eligible for our study, with 14 patients excluded for PCNSL, 29 patients for lymphoma diagnosis not meeting WHO criteria, 17 patients who died within 22 days of the diagnosis, 27 patients with previously treated lymphoma, and 50 patients with transformed lymphoma. To the Editor, Clinical trials are the gold standard by which therapies in oncology are evaluated and form the basis for approval of novel therapies. Recently, Khurana et al. showed that in a cohort of DLBCL patients between 9% and 24% would have ineligible for major clinical trials in lymphoma based on baseline laboratory abnormalities, with 15.9% excluded from GOYA [[11]]. [Extracted from the article]