| | | |  | Hello! Adam Feuerstein, Angus Chen, and Damian Garde here with coverage of Day 3 at the annual meeting of the American Society of Hematology, live from New Orleans. Don't forget to sign up for our live ASH recap, scheduled for Wednesday. | | | 
It beats walking. (Adam Feuerstein) Encouraging results for an NK cell therapy. Next steps? Unclear An experimental immunotherapy from Affimed for patients with advanced Hodgkin lymphoma has started to demonstrate long-lasting remissions that have, so far, eluded other treatments involving so-called natural killer cells.
But while the study update presented here delivered encouraging news, the German biotech’s path forward remains murky due to changes to the treatment’s manufacturing process and the new restrictions enacted by the Food and Drug Administration on accelerated approvals of cancer drugs.
Read more. | Pursuing a Cure: The ‘5-step formula’ approach to treating multiple myeloma Despite the enormous strides made in the treatment of multiple myeloma, unmet needs persist. Through a “5-step approach,” Janssen Oncology is translating science into innovative therapies to shape the future of multiple myeloma treatment. Learn more about the ‘5-step formula’ approach. | Wall Street weighs in Share prices of off-the-shelf cell therapy makers were flooded with sell orders on Monday. Adicet Bio and Affimed were the worst biotech-stock performers, each down more than 30% as investors raised new doubts about the durability and viability of their respective experimental cancer treatments. Kura Oncology, Karyopharm Therapeutics, and Fate Therapeutics were also ASH-related declines and among the worst stock performers Monday.
A general Wall Street takeaway from this meeting is that, once again, convenient, off-the-shelf cell therapeutics failed to deliver on their promise to supplant the more established, cumbersome, patient-specific treatments for blood cancers. To be fair, these are still early days for so-called allogeneic therapies that rely on donor T cells or natural killer cells. But as each ASH meeting passes, bespoke CAR-T makers like Gilead Sciences solidify their lead position. | Bispecifics > CAR-T? With more and more data suggesting bispecific antibodies are a powerful tool against advanced blood cancers, oncologists are left to debate whether — and for which patients — the new medicines could supplant the potent but inconvenient option of CAR-T therapy. Results presented at ASH suggest a slow-growing type of lymphoma could present an opportunity for bispecifics to elbow ahead in the sequence of treatments.
On Monday, Regeneron Pharmaceuticals presented data in which its bispecific, odronextamab, led to an 82% response rate for patients with follicular lymphoma, a form of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. About 75% of patients had a complete response, meaning they had no detectable disease, and the median duration of response was 20 months. Roche’s similar mosunetuzumab, a bispecific already awaiting FDA approval in follicular lymphoma, showed a response rate of 78% and a complete response rate of 60%, according to data presented Sunday.
Those results are comparable to the benefits of Gilead Sciences’ Yescarta and Novartis’ Kymriah, each already approved to treat follicular lymphoma. But unlike CAR-T, which involves pretreatment with chemotherapy and a lengthy manufacturing process, bispecifics are off-the-shelf medicines that can be dosed immediately, giving them a potential advantage. | Taylor Swift is an ASH stan The biggest news you didn’t hear about at ASH, until now, was an appearance by Taylor Swift. Sure, the globally famous singer-songwriter and Ticketmaster nemesis wasn’t technically attending the meeting, but she was in New Orleans on Saturday night, listening to jazz at Preservation Hall in the French Quarter — which also happened to be the venue for an ASH party hosted by the healthcare bankers from BTIG.
One ASH attendee on the scene told STAT that Swift’s proximity to biotech Wall Street types created quite the stir. Photos were taken, from a distance, because it’s not cool to walk up to Taylor Swift at a club and ask her if she wants to hear about the latest developments in hematology.
For those who were invited to the BTIG party but didn’t make it — Adam, ahem — FOMO ensued. | | | |
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