Emergent Therapies for Patients With Relapsed/Refractory Multiple Myeloma

Monique Hartley-Brown, MD, MMSc, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Boston, Massachusetts, discusses novel and emergent treatment developments for patients with relapsed/refractory (R/R) multiple myeloma (MM), which she presented at the 2023 Great Debates & Updates in Hematologic Malignancies meeting in Boston, Massachusetts. 

Transcript:

Hi, my name is Dr. Monique Hartley-Brown, and I am a multiple myeloma physician at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. I'm here today at the Great Debates in Hematologic Malignancies [meeting], and I'm happy to be here.

I just had a wonderful discussion and panel presentation to discuss the novel and emergent therapies in multiple myeloma, which is extremely exciting. It was hard to compress the talk into a mere 35 minutes, but we really did our best to span from current therapies, current guidelines, [and] the way to manage these newer therapies that are coming out. 

We have now, in the relapsed/refractory [multiple] myeloma setting, 5 approved agents—3 of which are bispecific antibodies, and 2 of which are cellular therapies. [Chimeric antigen receptor] (CAR) T-cell therapies, which we have been able to offer our patients who are in late relapse disease, and their outcomes are so much better with the CAR T[-cell]therapies. They're getting survival outcomes and progression-free survival beyond 2 years. 

With the bispecific therapies, we're finding that we can offer these off-the-shelf therapies to patients and still have an overall response rate in the 70th percentile for patients who have been heavily pretreated.

It's a wonderful time in myeloma, and I'm really excited about this talk. [I am] realizing that now, we have to figure out [the] best way to sequence these medications and how to use these medications in earlier diseases, whether it's in the newly diagnosed setting or in early relapse, so that we can get even better outcomes for our patients. Exciting times!

Source: 

Hartley-Brown, M. Relapsed/Refractory Multiple Myeloma: Novel and Cellular Therapies in 2023. Presented at the Great Debates and Updates in Hematologic Malignancies Meeting; August 17-19, 2023; Boston, Massachusetts.