Teclistamab & CMV: Risks and Clinical Outcomes Explained | Samer Al Hadidi, MD

Hello, everybody. My name is Samer Al-Hadidi. I'm an associate professor at the UT Southwestern Medical Center. Today, I'll be talking about one of the abstracts we're presenting at the meeting this time. We are actually presenting on the CMV reactivation in patients who are treated with Teclistimab, a bispecific antibody in the disease called multiple myeloma. We looked at patients who are treated with this agent in our institution, and we treated more than 170 patients with this agent over the last few years. And what we noted is the risk of CMV reactivation occurred in one out of five patients. We usually monitor those patients with CMV-BCR to see if they have asymptomatic CMV reactivation. The good news is most of those patients who even got the CMV reactivation remain asymptomatic. Around 10% of patients only developed symptoms related to CMV reactivation and less than 7% of them required treatment. Most of the patients recovered fully by holding the drug without treatment and reintroducing the drug at a later time. Our study actually showed that CMV reactivation is common with the use of bispecific antibodies, though it seems to not affect the patient outcome. We looked at overall survival as well as progression-free survival, and both of those got no effect with the CMV reactivation. So that's reassuring for patients as well as doctors who treat them. We actually also found that patients with previous history of CMV reactivation had the highest risk of CMV reactivation, around three-folds increase as well as older patients in general. So currently there is no guidelines to screen patients for CMV reactivation. Multiple clinical trials do that and we recommend doing that if you have clinical suspicion of reactivation. But the good news, even if that happened, patients usually do well and require no treatment for this condition. If our videos have helped you in any way and you're able to, please consider making a donation to help us continue this important work. Your gift will go three times as far when we reach $500,000 by the end of the year. Every contribution, big or small, makes a difference and we're deeply grateful for your support.