Hi, everyone. I'm Santiago Thibaut. I'm an assistant professor at Mount Sinai in New York. I focus on multiple myeloma. And I wanted to share with you today with the work that I presented yesterday at ASH. It's basically on CAR-T therapy. I'm sure many of you have heard about what that is and how we use it in myeloma. And it's extremely promising in terms of the outcomes that patients are having, the much, much improved outcomes and good survival with these therapies. But of course, there are side effects to them. And I particularly focused on one, which is what we call cytopenias, which actually means low blood counts. So there's a considerable number of patients who go on CAR-T therapy for myeloma that have become very anemic or their platelets go down or their white cells go down. And as a result, they end up needing transfusions or injections to boost their counts up. And the truth is we don't quite know why this happens. And there's a lot of work being done on trying to understand why. What we did is we have a lot of patients that were treated at Mount Sinai over the last couple of years with this CAR-T therapy, myeloma patients. So we had 90 patients that had undergone this treatment. And we were trying to both show, okay, how much of a problem is this? So we, at various time points, at one month, at two months, at six months or a year out after having received this treatment, how many patients are still struggling with these low blood counts? And we found that at the cutoff that we established, which was four months after receiving this therapy, almost a third of patients had a pretty severe cytopenia or one of their blood counts was severely low. Often it was more than one, right? It was anemia plus low platelets, for example. And of course, this is very important and it's something that we need to keep in mind about and especially try to understand who might actually be at risk of having these low blood counts. And we did some work on actually trying to understand who would be at highest risk. And in our work, we show that in general, people who are older at the time that they're receiving the therapy are more likely to have these low blood counts after CAR-T. People who have had a lot of prior treatments are also at higher risk of having the low blood counts. And people who have received the transplant previously as part of their therapy are also more likely. So this is still, even though it's 90 patients, it's still a work in progress and we're hoping to really expand this and study a lot more patients and really try to nail down what it is that would make someone be at higher risk for these low blood counts. So that's in a nutshell what we've presented and I'm hoping that you find it useful and I look forward to giving an update at a future meeting.
HealthTree • December 19, 2022