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What is meant by BCMA directed therapy?
Posted by
HealthTree • February 13, 2024
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Learn about BCMA directed therapy in this video.
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What is meant by BCMA-directed therapy? BCMA is a short term for where it's called B-cell maturation antigen. And basically what that is, it's a little target that's on the surface of the myeloma cells. And the myeloma cells express a whole bunch of different things on their surface. You can imagine them as little hairy caterpillars with lots of different things on the outside. But what's helpful is if you find a target that's unique to the myeloma cells that maybe isn't expressed in other places. And that is the kind of target that we look for when we're making an immune therapy. So something that we use where you're harnessing either the patient's own immune cells and you engineer them or you're using something that's going to flag the myeloma cells for destruction by the immune system. And basically researchers found that the B-cell maturation antigen or BCMA was fairly uniquely expressed by plasma cells. That it was something that was important to plasma cells. And actually if anything it looks like that as you go further through your therapy you're more likely to express BCMA. So the more lines of therapy that you go through the BCMA is preserved, it's still expressed. And so that makes it really attractive as a target for these kinds of treatments. So that's what's meant by B-cell maturation antigen BCMA targeting therapy. And there's lots of ways that you can do that. So you can make an antibody with a chemo target attached to it. You can make what's called a bispecific antibody where one bit binds to the target, another bit binds to the patient's own immune system. You bring those two things together. And then the other thing that you can do is you can make the patient's own cells, their T-cells, and you can genetically engineer them to express something on their surface that attaches to the target, in this case BCMA, and helps those cells recognize that target and flags those plasma cells or those malignant myeloma cells for destruction.
