New blood cancer therapy treats seven in 10 patients

An experimental therapy could offer blood cancer patients a “new lease on life,” say scientists.

The immunotherapy treatment, called talquetamab, successfully treated 73 percent of multiple myeloma patients in a global trial.

It helped people who had their disease relapsed more than once after other treatments failed to achieve remission for a long period of time.

Dr. Ajai Chari of the Tisch Cancer Institute’s Multiple Myeloma Program and lead author of both studies said, “This means that nearly three-quarters of these patients are looking for a new lease on life.”

The drug works by teaching the body’s white blood cells to kill tumor cells that form in a type of white blood cell called a plasma cell.

Multiple myeloma is a deadly cancer that kills around half of its patients within five years of diagnosis.

Talquetamab, given intravenously, helped shrink the cancer or eliminate it completely in about 73% of the patients who participated in the trials.

The new drug specifically targets the GPRC5D protein. Too much in the bone marrow is associated with poor survival in patients with multiple myeloma.

Talquetamab binds to GPRC5D, which assembles T cells, white blood cells that develop from stem cells in the bone marrow, to fight cancer cells.

It was tested in two separate trials, the first of which was published in September.

Results from Phase 2 were to be presented Saturday at the annual meeting of the American Society of Hematology.

The data reflected nearly 300 cancer patients who had tried at least three different therapies without achieving durable remission.

While 143 patients were treated with a weekly dose of 405 μg per kilogram and 145 patients treated with a higher dose of 800 μg per kilogram every two weeks.

The scientists recorded improvements in symptoms after about a month. People began to respond to treatments at different doses within about nine months.

More than 30 percent of the patients in both groups had a complete response, meaning that all signs of cancer were gone.

The rest of the successfully treated patients had a very good or better partial response, meaning that the cancer shrank substantially but not necessarily to zero.

Talquetamab also worked at least as well or better than other standard treatments for multiple myeloma.

Sixty-five percent of those who received talquetamab at the 405 μg dose and 70 percent of those who received it at the 800 μg dose had an immune response.

Meanwhile, only 25 percent of similar patients who received selinexor plus dexamethasone and 31 percent of those who received belantamab mafodotin.

Both drugs are approved by the Food and Drug Administration.