New Multiple Myeloma Therapies Offer Hope for Potential Cure: Ameet Patel, MD

Although multiple myeloma was once considered incurable, some therapies available today offer patients hope for a potential cure, Ameet Patel, MD, of Florida Cancer Specialists & Research Institute, told The American Journal of Managed Care® last week at the Institute for Value-Based Medicine® event in Tampa, Florida, titled “Pioneering the Next Era of Oncology Care.”

He expanded on this topic during the panel, “Scaling Innovation: Delivering Targeted Therapies, CAR-T, and Bispecifics in Multiple Myeloma.”

This transcript was lightly edited; captions were auto-generated.

Transcript

For context, can you briefly compare targeted therapies, bispecifics, and chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapies for multiple myeloma in terms of their efficacy and safety profiles?

To your point, I think this exemplifies how innovative this space has been for multiple myeloma. When I was in training, we talked about multiple myeloma as an incurable disease, but now we have cellular therapeutics that have now proven, over long follow-up times, that patients can, in fact, be cured with some of these therapies.

Targeted therapies, to distinguish from cellular therapies, are either oral- or immuno-drug conjugates that we utilize in a chronic or administrative fashion to be able to keep people's disease in remission, whereas in CAR-T, for example, we are talking about giving patients an infusion of CAR-T after lymphodepleting chemotherapy to be able to eradicate any residual or active multiple myeloma cells in somebody's body.

What we find is that there's a big proportion of individuals who are actually, long-term, cured and no longer need any kind of chronic treatment, which is a completely different paradigm from what we're used to in multiple myeloma.

This is in contrast to bispecific therapy or T-cell engagers, where, much like CAR-T, we utilize T cells to try and attack multiple myeloma cells. Instead, we utilize a drug to be able to infuse these therapies over time. In graded infusions, these T cells in a patient's body become more engaged to eradicate multiple myeloma cells, and we're seeing great efficacy in there, as well.