Allogeneic CAR T-Cell Therapy Assessed in Treatment-Resistant Multiple Myeloma Cases

For a paper in Nature Medicine, investigators at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center present findings from a Phase I trial dubbed UNIVERSAL aimed at treating relapsed or treatment refractory multiple myeloma with an allogeneic CAR T-cell therapy targeting the B-cell maturation antigen (BCMA) superfamily. "ALLO-715 is a first-in-class, allogeneic, anti-BCMA CAR T-cell therapy engineered to abrogate graft-versus-host disease and minimize CAR T rejection," the team notes, explaining that the current study focused on the safety and tolerability of ALL-715 in 43 relapsed/refractory multiple myeloma cases after a lymphodepletion step. While more than half of the patients experienced cytokine release syndrome and/or infections, neurotoxicities were less common, occurring in 14 percent of patients. When it came to the secondary endpoints, meanwhile, the authors saw response rates approaching 56 percent, including half a dozen patients with a complete response to the allogeneic BCMA-targeting CAR T-cell treatment. Treatment responses appeared to last more than eight months, on average. "The initial results support the feasibility and safety of allogeneic CAR T-cell therapy for myeloma," the authors explain, adding that "[o]ngoing and future studies will also evaluate the importance of the phenotypic characteristics of T cells obtained from healthy donors versus those obtained from relapsed or refractory patients with multiple previous lines of therapy."