Emerging Research and Therapies for Multiple Myeloma
Nina Shah, MD, touched on novel immunotherapies and other emerging therapies for patients with multiple myeloma.
Nina Shah, MD: A lot of emerging research is coming from novel immunotherapies. Now that we know what BCMA [B-cell maturation antigen] CAR T-cell therapy can do, we think ‘how can we make this better?’ There are other emerging therapies, for example, GPRC5D-directed CAR T-cell therapy, [which] I’m looking forward to seeing; and allogenic CAR T-cell therapy, which would increase access and availability as well as ease of giving this CAR T-cell therapy. That’s one of the factors when you think about what you’re going to give. It’s not just how well it’s going to be given and how well it’s going to do, but can you actually give it logistically. I’m also interested to see how we’re going to have novel bispecific therapy targeting GPRC5D and FcRH5. One of the other things that is really interesting about multiple myeloma, as I’ve mentioned many times before, [is that] quality of life is a very important outcome measure. That’s going to be one of the things that separates the different modalities that are available. If you can show that quality of life durably improves with some of these therapies, and it does, you may choose that over something where quality of life is either the same or goes down with the therapy because you are treating a person, not a patient. There are a lot of preclinical data coming out to suggest novel targets, and that’s going to be really exciting for us to think about how we may approach myeloma with different mechanisms of action. One of the things that we know about this disease is that the way you target it, particularly if you use different ways that synergize together, that’s the way we get the most amount of bang for a buck with combination chemotherapy. Overall, I really want to see if we can improve the duration of response not only in the frontline but in the second and third lines, and change this to a chronic illness where patients live with it but not die from it.
