Hi, my name is Rupur Rajay. I'm a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and I direct the multiple myeloma program at Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center. I'm here at ASH and I'm talking to you about bispecific T cell engagers. This meeting has been very exciting because a lot of bispecific T cell engagers have been presented at this meeting and this is particularly exciting because we actually have our first bispecific T cell engager already approved. This was only a few weeks back. What I presented at this year's ASH was another bispecific antibody. This is called elrenetamab. It targets the same protein that the clistamab does. It's called targeting BCMA. What bispecific T cell engagers do is target the tumor cell, in this case using BCMA, and then also targeting your T cells and activating your T cells and bringing those T cells in so that they can cause killing of these myeloma cells. We presented data on our first in human experience. This was 55 patients and subsequently my colleague also presented on 123 patients. What was remarkable was that in very, very heavily pre-treated patients who had pretty much all lines of treatment with an imid, a PI, and a CD38 monoclonal antibody, we saw response rates of 63% with stringent complete responses in about 38% of patients. When you looked at MRD negativity in these patients, we saw that 100% of patients where we could test for MRD negativity were MRD negative, suggesting that we're seeing very deep and very high response rates in this very heavily pre-treated patient population. The other piece of good news here was this was extremely well tolerated. Patients did extremely well. We do see some CRS, but there was really no neurotoxicity seen with this elrenetamab monotherapy in relapsed refractory myeloma. The study is still ongoing. What we found was that patients stayed in remission for as long as 17 months after starting this off the shelf bispecific monoclonal antibody. Really exciting and we're looking forward for more data to come down the pike so that we can actually use this in patients with multiple myeloma. This ASH meeting is obviously exciting. We have already mentioned one of the new bispecific T cell engagers that we presented. The larger cohort of patients of 123 mirrored what we saw in our first inhuman study. And excitingly, at this year's ASH, we have bispecifics against other targets. The other targets are GPCR5D and FCRH5. Both of them, this is either talcretamab or sevastamab. We are seeing extremely high response rates and very durable remissions. Again, going beyond BCMA and having other targets where we are seeing incredible responses. Really exciting this whole space of bispecific T cell engagers. We're just beginning to understand and these options are going to open up for all our patients going forward.
HealthTree • December 12, 2022