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 …

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 …

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 …

A promising experimental method for treating ad­vanced leukemia may point the way to important new treat­ment options for multiple myeloma.

“It is very exciting,” said Dr. Leif Bergsagel, a myeloma specialist from the Mayo Clinic in Arizona who was not involved in the study investigating the leukemia treat­ment. “I think this ap­proach could and should be extended to multiple myeloma.”  He pointed out, however, that “It will be several years before myeloma patients will be treated this way.”

In two recently published research articles, scientists from the University of Pennsylvania described initial results of a pilot study they are conducting.  The results …