[0:00–0:36]
On-Screen Title: Management of multiple myeloma continues to be a challenge due to treatment unpredictability
On-Screen Title: A new study uncovers a biomarker that can predict treatment response to BCMA CAR T-cell therapy
Dr. Mateo Mejia Saldarriaga: Multiple myeloma, despite all the advances, it’s still an incurable disease. CAR T has really revolutionized the field and has yielded unprecedented response rate and very prolonged responses, even in the most refractory patients. But we don’t really have any prognostic factor biomarker that will indicate which patient will respond better or which patient is at risk of earlier relapse.
[0:37–1:05]
Dr. Mateo Mejia Saldarriaga: Our study really arise from clinical observation. We had a patient receiving a CAR T product and we noticed that around day ten, it was a very sudden and significant increase in the absolute lymphocyte count on a routine CBC. A few weeks later, we had another patient with a similar observation. We start thinking, maybe this is more common than what we think and we want to understand not only how common is it, but what is the clinical implication or usefulness of this, this phenomenon.
[1:06–1:33]
Dr. Mateo Mejia Saldarriaga: We conducted a retrospective study. We had 156 patients with relapsed refractory myeloma treated with CAR T-cell therapy, specifically BCMA CAR T. We measured the absolute lymphocyte count in a complete and routine CBC at day minus five and then on day zero through 14. The results of this study show that this increase in ALC is very common amongst patients receiving BCMA CAR T.
[1:34–1:54]
Dr. Mateo Mejia Saldarriaga: Importantly, patients who had a higher ALC — we call that ALCmax in those first 14 days, had significantly improved progression-free survival. Patients with more than 1,000 had a median PFS of 30 months, whereas patients whose ALC was 500 or less had a median PFS of roughly six months.
[1:55–2:36]
Dr. Mateo Mejia Saldarriaga: We’re lucky to have Columbia as our partner in this study. We were able to develop and be able to analyze data in roughly two weeks that normally will take over six months. Here at Weill Cornell Medicine NewYork-Presbyterian, our goal is to leverage our findings in the multiple myeloma space and translate it to lymphoma and other malignancies in the hematological or oncological space to really benefit all the community that is affected by cancer.
On-Screen Title: ALCmax is already being implemented by institutions around the world to improve treatment planning in CAR T-cell therapy
[END]
