Empowered Patient Podcast Innovations in Cell Therapy for Relapsed and Refractory Multiple Myeloma with Dr. Chris Heery Arcellx
Dr. Chris Heery is Chief Medical Officer at Arcellx, a company focusing on developing anito-cel, a significant advancement in CAR-T cell therapy, to treat relapsed and refractory multiple myeloma (rrMM). Multiple myeloma is a rare type of blood cancer that affects plasma cells in the bone marrow and has few treatment options. Arcellx is showing promising data from clinical trials with patients with rrMM who have failed prior therapies and have received Fast Track, Orphan Drug, and Regenerative Medicine Advanced Therapy Designations from the FDA for anito-cel.
Chris explains, "The company was founded based on an idea that you could take a novel protein structure and modify it to be able to bind to targets on the surface of cancer cells. And over many years of work, the founders were able to demonstrate that that was possible. Over the last three or four years, Arcellx has focused more on taking what were some of those early ideas and turning them into a product that can help patients. For these last three or four years, most of our focus has been around the lead asset that we call anito-cel that treats multiple myeloma and trying to get that product through the approval process to be able to be a commercial product that can be used for patients both in the United States and the rest of the world."
"When a patient is diagnosed with multiple myeloma, in general, most patients are older. The median age of diagnosis of multiple myeloma is around 70 years old, and those plasma cells can cause damage to the normal bone marrow by crowding out the normal bone marrow."
"They can also make a lot of the protein that a normal plasma cell would make. By making a lot of that protein, those proteins can cause deposition and damage into other tissues. So, patients can arrive at the clinic with a variety of different symptoms that have to do with either decreased bone marrow activity, decreased number of normal cell populations in their blood, or damage to things like their kidneys or other end organs that you need for normal human function."
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