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Researchers from Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSK) and Mount Sinai have uncovered treatments that can assist patients with multiple myeloma, a blood cancer, who have tried the immunotherapy CAR-T but have experienced relapses.
Chimeric antigen receptor T-cell therapy, or CAR-T for short, uses immune cells called T cells to treat multiple myeloma by modifying them in the lab to enable them to recognise and eradicate cancer cells. Although a groundbreaking therapy for this fatal malignancy, some patients who undergo CAR-T therapy relapse and are left with no other viable options for treatment. When multiple myeloma patients relapsed following BCMA-directed CAR-T, a form of CAR-T cell therapy that targets the BCMA protein on cancerous plasma cells to treat multiple myeloma, they were treated with a variety of different therapies, according to a recent study published in the journal Blood in November. The researchers discovered that alternative T cell therapies, such as bispecific antibodies and various forms of CAR-T cell therapy, appear to have the most pronounced effectiveness in permanently eradicating the disease in these relapsed patients. "The findings of this study will serve as a benchmark for future prospective clinical studies that intend to improve the outcomes of patients who progress after CAR-T," said a senior author on the study, Samir Parekh, MD, Director of Translational Research in Multiple Myeloma and co-leader of the Cancer Clinical Investigation program at The Tisch Cancer Institute at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. "This is the first study to report outcomes of different therapeutic options given to a large cohort of patients who relapsed after anti-BCMA CAR-T therapy. This is one of the most urgent and unmet needs in myeloma patients and, therefore, of great interest to the hematology community." This retrospective study examined the illness features, post-relapse medications, and therapeutic responses of 79 patients. The median overall survival of patients is currently around 18 months. In these patients, stem cell transplantation had some success as well. Based on the features of each patient's cancer, different drug combinations may also be administered with varying degrees of success, the study discovered. The Tisch Cancer Institute and MSK provided care for the patients. "We're encouraged that subsequent use of other novel immune therapies like a second CAR-T cell therapy or a bispecific antibody was feasible and led to durable responses in patients," said Sham Mailankody, MBBS, Associate Attending Physician, MSK, and senior author on the paper. "We look forward to continuing this work and unlocking the full potential of immune therapies for patients with multiple myeloma." (ANI)
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