Hello, I'm Hira Sheikh. I'm the faculty at University of Iowa Hospitals focusing on the plasma cell malignancies including multiple myeloma, amyloidosis, and do all therapies including autologous stem cell transplant, cardi cell therapy, and the bispecific antibodies. We undertook this study as a multi-institutional effort of multiple institutions including ours, Kansas University, Medical University of South Carolina, Levine Cancer Center, and so on. So it was a combination of five centers that were contributing data. We looked at about 60 plus patients and we found that 63 of them had Telquidamab, which is one of the therapies of multiple myeloma in the relapse refractory setting and also FDA approved by the United States. We found that 63 of those patients had prior BCMA exposure and what do I mean by that? That means either they had a prior BCMA cardi cell therapy or a bispecific antibody or an antibody drug conjugate such as a BALENTIMAB, which were all therapies that were approved before Telquidamab and have been pretty effective. We in the hematology world have been pretty concerned if patients would respond well to Telquidamab after they have been heavily exposed, especially with a lot of BCMA therapies. And that was the main objective of undertaking this study. We found out that majority of the patients actually responded very, very well. So the response rate in our study was 69% and 45% of them were very good partial response or better. So we talk about how deeper the responses were. This was also safely tolerated. The side effects we noted in this study were fairly comparable to the trial such as majestic trial, which led to the approval of Telquidamab. Hence we think that this is a very good therapy and has good outcomes in patients who have been exposed to BCMA-directed therapies. A few signals we saw there were that patients who had BCMA therapy within the six months after before Telquidamab, they did not do as well. And now that we are fortunate enough to have this problem where we have so many therapies for myeloma, a sequencing becomes such a big and important question. And we do hope that the results of this study are going to help with the sequencing as in how much gap should be there between two different therapies and should I rather not do one therapy after the other and try to sandwich them. So we do think this is an initial study because it's looking at the charts backward retrospective and not really intended to do that way from the very beginning. So it needs to be pursued as a large trial to see if the effects are substantiated and looked at everywhere.
HealthTree • December 17, 2024