An expert from Vanderbilt University Medical Center says that patients with relapsed/refractory multiple myeloma may be able to live a normal life following response to salvage treatment with bispecific monoclonal antibodies.
Bhagirathbhai Dholaria, MBBS, noted that bispecific monoclonal antibodies may become an important part of the relapsed/refractory multiple myeloma treatment paradigm in an interview during the 2023 American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) Annual Meeting.
Dholaria, an assistant professor of Medicine in the Department of Medicine and Division of Hematology-Oncology at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, spoke about the phase 1 TRIMM-2 study (NCT04108195) assessing daratumumab (Darzalex) plus talquetamab in patients with relapsed/refractory multiple myeloma. He indicated that bispecifics may be the key to salvaging patients and allowing them to live a normal life following response to treatment.
Transcript:
In patients with heavily pretreated relapsed or refractory multiple myeloma, the bispecific monoclonal antibodies are going to be the new cornerstone of therapy, which is beyond currently approved therapies. Both teclistamab and multiple other bispecific antibodies that are currently under investigation appear to have quite robust overall response data. Responses appear to be rapid and deep, and in many cases appear to be durable. The future is very bright in terms of novel therapies in relapsed/refractory multiple myeloma.
That's all good for our patients because many of [them] would have not survived in the past because of the rapidly progressing myeloma. Now, [they can] potentially be salvaged and live a close to normal life once they respond to these therapies.
There will be multiple [analyses] looking at different subgroups of patients, specifically patients who had prior CAR T-cell therapy or other bispecific monoclonal antibody therapy exposure, to see if the overall responses that we're seeing right now hold true and what the durability of response is going to be.
Also, we'll try to learn some [of the] unique toxicity aspects. We'll be looking at the [minimal residual disease] responses. [We’ll] analyze how deep the responses are in this trial in the future. Of course, we don't have mature data right now to [determine this] at this point.
Dholaria BR, Weisel K, Mateos MV, et al. Talquetamab (tal) + daratumumab (dara) in patients (pts) with relapsed/refractory multiple myeloma (RRMM): updated TRIMM-2 results. J Clin Oncol. 2023;41(suppl 16):8003. doi:10.1200/JCO.2023.41.16_suppl.8003