Hello, my name is Jens Hylengas. I'm the chief of myeloma at Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center in Buffalo, New York. I'm here at ASH 2023 in San Diego. And I would like to talk about one of the abstracts that I had the privilege to present. It was an updated result of the CARD2-2 study, specifically cohort A and B. CARD2-2 is a study using silta cell, which is a CAR T cell therapy for patients who have been treated with several prior lines of therapy. It's approved in the US and in Europe, but currently patients have to have had four prior lines of therapy in the United States to be eligible for CAR T cell therapy. In this abstract, we presented the data from a clinical trial where patients were enrolled two cohorts. There are more cohorts, but what we presented were cohort A and B. And cohort A enrolled patients who had one to three prior lines of therapy. And cohort B had one prior line of therapy, but those patients had a relapse where the disease came back within 12 months after either high dose chemotherapy and stem cell transplant, or if they did not get a transplant after initiation of treatment. What we found was that almost all patients did respond very well. Actually, all patients responded very well, 195%, 100% and 95%. And the response was very durable. We had a follow-up for 24 months where we looked for the duration of response if the patients were still in remission, and most patients were. The safety of this treatment was, which is of course very important, especially in early lines of therapy, it was fairly well tolerated. There are certain toxicities of this treatment that is well known. It's called CRS, cytokine release syndrome, which usually goes along with fever, but this all resolved. And another side effect is the so-called ICANS, the immune cell associated neurotoxicity, where patients can have neurological issues. But also all patients who had this experience, all those side effects resolved. Another side effect that has to be mentioned is neutropenia, meaning very low white cells, and that obviously can be associated with infections, but that also results in most patients and could be managed because that's something that we know as myeloma doctors how to treat. There were three patients in each cohort who passed away, and most of them, those patients passed away from the multiple myeloma that came back during this observation period. And two patients in one cohort and one patient in the other cohort passed away from other reasons, two because of infections, as I mentioned, that's a problem, and one patient because of a cardiac arrest, but this patient myeloma also came back, so there was definitely also effect of this. So in summary, the treatment of multiple myeloma with cartilisal therapy in a clinical trial early in lines of therapy is doable, it's feasible, and we hope that we will get better data with more patients being enrolled in further clinical trials. There's actually already one trial that used the same inclusion criteria as the cohort A with one to three prior lines of therapy. It's called Cartitude 4 and has also been presented already and has also been published in the New England Journal of Medicine. you
HealthTree • December 21, 2023