Hi, I'm Santiago Thibaut. I'm a myeloma doctor at Mount Sinai in New York. I am going to share with you the results of a poster I presented here at ASH. The poster relates to CAR-T, which is a treatment we are all, many people are talking about. And with CAR-T therapy, there's a number of side effects that can come up, right? And one of them, and one that we're learning more and more about is some patients after getting CAR-T, their blood counts remain very low for a prolonged period of time. While some people recover all their blood counts, their red cells, their white cells, their platelets recover in a shorter period of time, there's others for whom it takes many months or even up to a year. And there's a lot of interest in understanding why these patients have these prolonged low blood counts. And our work is basically looking at our data. We have 140 patients that we've treated with CAR-T that we are looking at the different characteristics of those patients to see who, what were the factors that may have influenced a patient having those longer periods with low blood counts. And we're finding many different things. And one of them, an important one is that we have all these markers to show inflammation. And in patients that have elevated markers for inflammation prior to getting CAR-T, it seems to be that the counts take longer to recover from CAR-T. Some other factors were identified. For example, patients who are older, perhaps their bone myros are not as healthy as those of younger patients, and therefore their counts take longer to recover. And then another one is how many, what prior myeloma treatments have you had? The more treatment patient has had, the more likely it is that their blood counts will remain low for a longer period of time. So these are all factors that hopefully will enable us to predict who is more likely to have this issue and eventually learn how we can help it and give the right care to these patients.
HealthTree • December 21, 2023