New Treatment Combination with CTL019 Targets Precursors of Cancerous White Blood Cells

Philadelphia (Press Release) – A multiple myeloma patient whose cancer had stopped responding after nine dif­fer­en­t treat­ment regi­mens ex­peri­enced a com­plete remission after receiving an inves­ti­ga­tional per­son­al­ized cellular ther­apy known as CTL019 developed by a team at the University of Pennsylvania. The inves­ti­ga­tional treat­ment was com­bined with chemo­ther­apy and an au­tol­o­gous stem cell trans­plant – a new strat­egy designed to target and kill the cells that give rise to myeloma cells.

The team’s findings are published in a case report …

The American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) meeting in any given year is hit-or-miss as far as breaking research for multiple myeloma goes.

However, at ASCO 2015, there were no two views among myeloma experts. It was probably one of the most sig­nif­i­cant ASCO meetings as far as pre­senta­tions of abstracts that have the poten­tial to alter the land­scape of myeloma treat­ment in the near future.

There is no way to do justice to all the presentations at ASCO this year. However, I have tried to prepare a quiz to high­light …

There was an im­por­tant multiple myeloma-related presentation this Monday at the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) annual meeting in Chicago.

The presentation summarized early results of a pilot clin­i­cal trial being conducted at the University of Pennsylvania. The trial, which is scheduled to enroll 10 re­lapsed myeloma patients, is testing a promising ap­proach to cancer treat­ment known as “chimeric an­ti­gen re­cep­tor” (CAR) T-cell ther­apy.

CAR T-cell ther­apy has generated impressive results when used to treat certain kinds of leukemia and lym­phoma. These results have led to a concerted effort to use …

The 51st annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) started earlier to­day, May 29, and will go through June 2 in Chicago.

Approximately 30,000 physicians and re­searchers from all over the world are ex­pec­ted to attend the five-day meeting to discuss cur­rent re­search in cancer treat­ment and care.

During the meeting, there will be pre­sen­ta­tions about all types of cancer, in­clud­ing many pre­sen­ta­tions focused spe­cif­i­cally on mul­ti­ple myeloma. In fact, more than 90 myeloma-related stud­ies are scheduled to be pre­sented, in one form or another, in con­nec­tion with the …

This past Sunday was the second day of the American Society of Hema­tology’s (ASH) annual meeting, which was held in San Francisco.

As on the first day of the meeting, myeloma-related pre­sen­ta­tions once again took place during several sessions through­out the day.

A myeloma-related education session held the first day of the conference was repeated once again on Sunday morning.

While the education session was being held, a separate “scientific sym­po­sium” with two oral pre­sen­ta­tions took place in parallel.  The session focused on a novel immuno­therapeutic ap­proach to treating cancer known as …

Separately, Celgene and bluebird bio to col­lab­o­rate with the Center for Cell and Gene Therapy to ad­vance new and existing CAR T-cell pro­grams

Cambridge, MA (Press Release) – bluebird bio, a privately-held bio­technology com­pany focused on gene ther­apy, today announced the for­ma­tion of a broad, global strategic col­lab­o­ra­tion with Celgene Corpo­ra­tion to discover, develop and com­mer­cial­ize novel disease-altering gene ther­a­pies in on­col­ogy. The col­lab­o­ra­tion will focus on applying gene ther­apy tech­nology to genetically modify a patient’s own T-cells, known as chi­meric an­ti­gen re­cep­tor (CAR) T-cells, to target and destroy cancer cells. The multi-year research and devel­op­ment col­lab­o­ra­tion has the poten­tial to lead to the devel­op­ment and com­mer­cial­iza­tion of multiple CAR T-cell prod­ucts. Celgene has an option …

One of The Myeloma Beacon's most popular news stories of 2011 reported on an important new devel­op­ment in the use of gene ther­apy to treat blood cancers.

In particular, the article described promising results from a small study using gene ther­apy to treat patients who have chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL), and it looked at how those results might translate into new ther­a­pies for multiple myeloma (see related Beacon news).

Since the results of the CLL study were made public last year, follow-up results and addi­tional ongoing studies further indicate …