New blood cancer therapy treats seven in 10 patients trends now
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An experimental therapy could offer blood cancer patients a 'new lease on life', scientists say.
The immunotherapy treatment — called talquetamab — successfully treated 73 percent of patients with multiple myeloma in a global trial.
It helped people who had relapsed in their disease more than once after other treatments failed to bring them into remission for an extended period of time.
Dr Ajai Chari from the Multiple Myeloma Program at The Tisch Cancer Institute and lead author of both studies said: ‘This means that almost three-quarters of these patients are looking at 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 which kills around half of sufferers within five years of a diagnosis.
Talquetamab, administered intravenously, helped reduced cancer or clear it entirely in about 73 per cent of patients who took part in the trials
The new drug specifically targets the protein GPRC5D. Too much of it in the bone marrow is associated with poor survival in patients with multiple myeloma.
Talquetamab binds to GPRC5D which rallies T cells - white blood cells that develop from stem cells in the bone marrow – to fight
