An Expert’s Take on Promising Myeloma Treatment and Research
An Expert’s Take on Promising Myeloma Treatment and Research from Patient Empowerment Network on Vimeo.
Myeloma research is advancing quickly. Dr. Joshua Richter, a myeloma expert, shares his excitement about emerging treatments in development.
Dr. Joshua Richter is director of Multiple Myeloma at the Blavatnik Family – Chelsea Medical Center at Mount Sinai. He also serves as Assistant Professor of Medicine in The Tisch Cancer Institute, Division of Hematology and Medical Oncology. Learn more about Dr. Richter, here.
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Transcript:
Katherine:
When it comes to myeloma research and emerging treatment options, what are you most excited about, specifically?
Dr. Richter:
So, I think the big thing that I’m excited about from myeloma that we’re on the cusp of is T-cell engagers and T-cell based therapies. And, essentially, we all have T cells in our body, and T cells are a part of our immune system. They attack bacteria, viruses, and cancer.
And one of the best cancer fighters that exists is our own immune system. And the old way of treating cancer and blood cancers like myeloma was just to give medicines that suppressed all of the immune system, the good and the bad. Now, we’re trying to be more precise, and there’s certain parts of the immune system that we don’t want down, we want up. So, they help attack the cancer.
And the two biggest technologies are something called CAR T and something called bispecific antibodies. CAR T stands for chimeric antigen receptor T cells.
And, basically, what that is is we collect your T cells, we engineer them in the lab to rev them up and target the cancer. And we can put them back into you and they attack the cancer, very exciting. And then we have something called a bispecific antibody that has two arms. And as we infuse this medicine into you, one arm grabs onto the cancer cell, the other arm grabs onto your T cell and makes that T cell activate and attack the cancer cell.
And a lot of these drugs are in clinical trials as well. So, we’re very excited about moving from, you know, just lowering everything, the good and the bad, to being more precise and saying, no, no, no. There are some cells that we want way, way up.
Katherine:
Right. Right. So, you’re – you’re being much more specific now.
Dr. Richter:
Mm-hmm.
