IMS 2025 | Ongoing trials in CAR T-cell therapy for multiple myeloma: the CARTITUDE trials and aMMbition

So I think we’re going to discuss the data from the CARTITUDE-1 trial tomorrow. That’s one of the subject topics that we are covering. And actually CARTITUDE-1 was a study in which a new CAR-T-Cell product, cilta-cel, was applied and administered in patients that had received at least six lines of prior therapy. And we knew at that time from different analyses that the likelihood of responding of these patients to any treatment was around 30%, and a median progression-free survival only about 4.6 months. Now with cilta-cel, the overall response rate improved from less than 30 to 97.7 percent and we had about 82 percent complete remissions and the median progression-free survival was 34.9 months so it was a major step forward. And there has been a long-term follow-up which is I think also presented at this meeting that a third of the patients just remember six lines of prior therapy, 84 triple class refractory, were still alive and disease-free five years after CAR T-cell infusion. And in a single institution they also checked their patients and they were MRD negative so five years after CAR T-cell infusion still MRD negative I think this is the first hint that even in patients that are heavily pretreated, there can be long-term disease-free survival following CAR T-cell therapy. So I think CAR T-cell therapy is really a big hope for immunotherapy. And we are now moving CAR T-cell therapy to earlier lines of therapy. Now in the CARTITUDE-4 trial, patients have received CAR T-cell therapy after one to three prior lines of therapy versus CARTITUDE-1, where it was applied after six lines of prior therapy. The earlier application induced a higher response rate and especially a longer progression-free survival and overall survival. And now CAR T-cell therapy is moving to first-line therapy. So in the CARTITUDE-6 trial, actually there is a head-to-head comparison between transplantation, autologous stem cell transplantation and CAR T-cell therapy. So with this, I think we are going to see immunotherapy coming into earlier lines of therapy. And in addition, we also see that now the bispecifics are coming in addition to CAR T-cell therapy. So there’s the Ambition trial in which bispecifics are given either before or after CAR T-cell therapy. And we hope that this will further increase the response rate, the rate of complete remissions, and especially the progression-free survival, and hopefully also cure some patients with multiple myeloma.

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