Sandy Wong, MD, on Her Hopes for 2023

Sandy Wong, MD, of the University of California, San Francisco, has big hopes in 2023 for patients with multiple myeloma.

“My hope is that we can prolong patients’ lives, we can improve the quality of their lives, and we can help them to lead healthier and better lives,” Dr. Wong said.

Specifically, she hopes to see greater access to therapies such as chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cells for patients.

“My hope for patients with myeloma in 2023 is that we will have, [for] one, CAR T cells that are BMCA-directed more available for our patients,” Dr. Wong said. “That has been a very big area of need given the restraints on slot availability, so I’m really hoping that that would be the new year’s resolution that we all aspire to: to allow more patients to receive these therapies that are highly effective.”

For patients who are unable to wait for a CAR-T treatment, Dr. Wong hopes to see “greater availability of teclistamab,” a bispecific antibody that received accelerated approval for relapsed or refractory multiple myeloma from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in October 2022.

“Many institutions are still trying to put together the workflow to be able to offer this to patients, so that’ll be my second hope for patients in 2023,” Dr. Wong said. “Hopefully these additional treatment options are made more widely available.”