Castleman Disease

The purpose of this study is to collect clinical, laboratory, and patient survey data from patients with Castleman disease to improve understanding, diagnosis, and treatment of the disease. Funding source - FDA OOPD.

Autoinflammatory diseases (AID) are clinical entities characterized by recurrent inflammatory attacks in absence of infection, neoplasm or deregulation of the adaptive immune system. Among them, hereditary periodic syndromes, also known as monogenic AID, represent the prototype of this disease group, caused by mutations in genes involved in the regulation of innate immunity, inflammation and cell death. Based on recent experimental acquisitions in the field of monogenic AID, several immunologic disorders have been reclassified as polygenic/multifactorial AID, sharing pathogenetic and clinical features with hereditary periodic fevers. This has paved the way to new treatment targets for patients suffering from rare diseases of unknown origin, including Behçet's disease, Still disease, Schnitzler's disease, PFAPA (periodic fever, aphthous stomatitis, pharyngitis and cervical adenitis) syndrome, chronic recurrent multifocal osteomyelitis (CRMO), non-infectious uveitis and scleritis. Gathering information on such rare conditions is made difficult by the small number of patients, along with the difficulty of obtaining an accurate diagnosis in non-specialized clinical settings. In this context, the AIDA project promotes international collaboration among clinical centres to develop a permanent registry aimed at collecting demographic, genetic, clinical and therapeutic data of patients affected by monogenic and polygenic AID, in order to expand the current knowledge of these rare conditions.

The study is a pilot, observational, retrospective, and (italian) multicenter study. The study will involve the collection of patient data from medical records for patients with Multicentric Castelman Disease Relapsed/Refractory who received treatment with at least one dose of siltuximab, as part of standard of care in a real-life context, from July 2016 till April 2022 in 31selected italian centres.

Unicentric Castleman Disease (UCD) is a rare non-malignant localised disease involving one or more lymph nodes, associating germinal centre atrophy, mantle zone thickening and intense vascular proliferation penetrating the germinal centres. Patients usually seek medical attention because of a localised, sometimes compressive, lymph node or the development of life-threatening autoimmune complications (paraneoplastic pemphigus or PNP or myasthenia gravis or MG). The best treatment option is complete surgical excision, but it has been recently demonstrated that up to half of the patients cannot undergo surgery. In these patients, an efficient medical approach needs be defined, as no current medical treatment has demonstrated to lower morbidity and mortality. The cause of UCD is currently unknown and current data favour a scenario of stromal impairment leading to the loss of lymph node architecture rather than one of a primary hematopoietic disease. UCD lesions are often associated with synchronous follicular dendritic cell (FDC) proliferation and can sometimes evolve towards a true FDC sarcoma (FDCS), indicating a possible role for FDC, a germinal centre stromal cell component, in UCD pathogenesis. A recurrent somatic activating mutation in PDGFRB (p.N666S) has been recently described in the CD45 negative (non-hematopoietic) compartment of up to 17% UCD specimens. Moreover, activation of the VEGFR pathway is thought to play a role in the development of the disease, especially in the increased vascularity characteristic of the UCD lesion. Nintedanib is a commercially available tyrosine-kinase inhibitor targeting PDGF, VEGF and FGF receptors. The drug has obtained European Market Authorization in 2015 for the treatment of Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer and Idiopathic Pulmonary Fibrosis with a satisfactory safety profile. The hypothesis is that nintedanib could benefit patients with unresectable or partially resectable UCD.