CAR-T Meeting 2025 | Bispecifics in the CAR-T era: where do they fit?
In this video, Jeremy Deuel, MD, PhD, University Hospital of Zürich, Zürich, Switzerland, briefly comments on the role of bispecific antibodies in the era of CAR T-cell therapy, highlighting their lower toxicity and greater accessibility. Dr Deuel explains that bispecifics can be used as a bridging treatment during CAR T-cell manufacturing. However, further research is needed to elucidate whether treating the patient with a bispecific antibody targeting the same antigen as the subsequent CAR T-cell therapy may increase the risk of antigen loss and decrease the efficacy of CAR-T. This interview took place at the EHA-EBMT 7th European CAR T-cell Meeting, held in Strasbourg, France.
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Transcript (AI-generated)
So at a CAR T-cell meeting, everybody talks about CAR T-cells but of course there are also bispecific antibodies that are able to link normal T-cells to cancer cells. And in this session I elaborated on how bispecifics work, what their biology is, and what the difference is to CAR T-cells, which namely is the missing co-stimulatory domain leading to perhaps less efficacy than CAR T-cells but also less side effects...
So at a CAR T-cell meeting, everybody talks about CAR T-cells but of course there are also bispecific antibodies that are able to link normal T-cells to cancer cells. And in this session I elaborated on how bispecifics work, what their biology is, and what the difference is to CAR T-cells, which namely is the missing co-stimulatory domain leading to perhaps less efficacy than CAR T-cells but also less side effects. So they’re kind of perhaps weaker alternatives to CAR T cells, but they’re available off the shelf, so they might be viable treatment options if you need to give treatment fast or if you have a patient that is not able to receive CAR T-cells due to the condition of the patient.
Usually bispecifics or sometimes bispecifics are given as a bridging treatment exactly because they are more easily available during the time it takes for the CAR T-cells to be manufactured and we’re always afraid of losing the target on the tumor cells if you treat the patient with the same targeting bispecific than with CAR T-cells. But it’s a not very well studied field so I think further studies are necessary to figure out if this is a good idea or not although some data are already available and some more are to come.
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