I'm Dr. Jim Berenson. I'm the medical and scientific director of the Institute for Bioloma and Bone Cancer Research in West Hollywood, California. And it's my pleasure to share with you today some work we've done related to a class of drugs that's been used in a wide variety of diseases, but not really in cancer, and they are called Jack inhibitors. What we've demonstrated over the last few years that these drugs have activity in myeloma, specifically, specifically, Ruxolitin. That drug is very active, and we've shown that it helps enhance the activity of other drugs useful in myeloma, like lentilidomide and steroids such as dexamethasone, methylpregnizolone. And what we're presenting at the meeting is that people who have failed after responding to Ruxolitin and methylpregnizolone, if you add lentilidomide, this immunomodulatory agent that they've been resistant to, they now will respond. And the beauty of these combinations is they're all pills, they're well tolerated, and that's a home run for patients. Patients really like to be on oral therapy, and they really like drugs that don't have side effects that actually work, and that's what we have here. I'm so excited to let you know that the work we've been doing over the last dozen years on B cell maturation agents, or BCMA in the blood as a marker, is proving to be useful in this trial, in that the levels of BCMA both predicted whether patients would respond and also determine much more quickly when the disease would progress than the conventional markers. And so this looks like to be a real advance, and we hope that this marker will be used in the future to guide our therapies in myeloma.
HealthTree • December 27, 2023