Understanding Prolonged Low Blood Counts After CAR-T Therapy |Zachary Avigan, MD | ASCO YIA

Hi, I'm Zach Avigan. I'm a fellow at Mount Sinai in New York and excited to talk about my ASCO Young Investigator Award. So ASCO, or the American Society of Clinical Oncology, is an American oncology organization that has a range of conferences and gives out some grants to young investigators. And this is an award I got called the Young Investigator Award that's given to fellows and junior faculty. This is specifically to study something called hematologic toxicity after CAR T cells for multiple myeloma patients. So as people might know, CAR T cells such as CILTA cell and IDA cell have been a fantastic therapy for multiple myeloma patients and can really give really deep and durable remissions for a long period of time, potentially with no maintenance therapy afterwards. But as these CAR T therapies are moving into earlier line therapy, we're really focused on some of the toxicities or side effects that can happen after CAR T. And one of these toxicities is called hematologic toxicity. And that's where patients can have low blood counts for a very long period after their CAR T treatment. And potentially some of those patients can even develop secondary cancers like myelodysplastic syndrome or acute myeloid leukemia after the CAR T. So we're really trying to understand who develops these hematologic toxicities and why so that we can better prevent them in the future. So this project is trying to study a combination of both inflammatory factors, like certain inflammatory lab values, both in the blood and the bone marrow, things called cytokines that are different inflammatory pathways, as well as something called clonal hematopoiesis, which is the presence of some of these mutations in the bone marrow that can happen in other types of cells outside the myeloma called myeloid cells. And understand how some of those mutations and these inflammatory pathways after CAR T can work together to try to cause some of these hematologic toxicities like these prolonged low blood counts that can be challenging for patients. So through this project, we're trying to basically understand who are the right patients to get CAR T cell therapy. And for those who get CAR T cells, how can we make that safer so that they experience all the benefit from the remission they get from the myeloma without some of those negative side effects. Thanks so much for your attention. I'm really looking forward to working on this project and hopefully having more data for you in the future.