Myeloma Research: Late Relapse, CAR T-Cell Therapy & Bispecific Antibodies at ASH 2024

In my overview of the great research presented in multiple myeloma at the ASH annual meeting, I identified five key areas of research. Let's dive into area number four, which is late relapse. To learn more about the other areas that we're exploring from ASH, please subscribe to our YouTube channel and you can learn about the other four areas that I highlight. As we've noted before, unfortunately patients do relapse with this disease, but we're developing more and more therapies that come at myeloma in a different way, in a different angle. I think perhaps the most exciting research in late relapse at ASH this year was the anito-cel study.

This is yet another CAR T-cell therapy that targets the BCMA target on multiple myeloma. But there was a couple of interesting features about this drug. First of all, we saw that it had really quite a prolific depth of response, meaning 97% of patients responded to this therapy and over 60% of them developed a complete remission. So really amazing depth of response. It's a little bit early to determine how durable that response was, but we saw that around 80% of patients were still in remission at one year. But what I also found fascinating about this study, it was that we did not see the delayed neurological effects that we sometimes see in CAR T-cell therapy.

Unfortunate things like Parkinson's disease and Guillain-Barre and other nerve effects that sometimes can influence our selection of CAR T-cell therapy. So it still may be a bit early to draw conclusions, but I think it'll be very important to see, as this drug is developed, if we're able to obtain that great efficacy with less of the toxicity or the side effects that we've seen before. But also, we saw great bispecific antibodies being developed in multiple myeloma. There was etentamig, the artist formerly known as ABBV-383, which is an interesting molecule. It targets BCMA, but what I found fascinating about this drug is it's given only once monthly. It's given in the outpatient setting, and it even may be given without step-up dosing. This may be particularly important for us to be able to introduce bispecific antibody therapy in the community without having to come to an academic center.

And then lastly, the other bispecific that I want to comment on is called cevostamab. And what I found interesting about cevostamab was it comes at myeloma in a different way. It has a different target instead of the typical targets we've used before, like BCMA and GPRC5D. Here's yet another target called FcRH5 and cevostamab targets FcRH5. And even those patients that have been quite heavily pretreated with different immunotherapies, we saw a response rate of about 45%. Time fails me to go through all the other areas that are being explored with new classes of drugs, with new ways of giving a bispecific antibodies and CAR Ts.

These are truly exciting times in multiple myeloma. And if you're interested in learning about the other hot areas of myeloma research, please subscribe to our YouTube channel or come visit us at myeloma.org.