By the time patients with multiple myeloma have gone through four or five different therapies, the outlook for any new treatment is dim. Most interventions offer these patients only a scant few more months of life. But new data on a Janssen CAR-T therapy called cilta-cel suggests the treatment might help halt progression of the disease for nearly two years.
“That, for our patients, is something that we’ve never seen before from any other single agent,” said Krina Patel, an oncologist at the MD Anderson Cancer Center who has served on an advisory board for Janssen but did not work on cilta-cel. “We might get a few months for most patients with a new agent, but 21.8 months without any therapy is fantastic.”
The Janssen trial, called CARTITUDE-1, has now treated 97 patients with cilta-cel and the overall response rate to the drug is 98%, up from 95% earlier this year. These patients had already tried an average of six other lines of therapy before being treated with cilta-cel.
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