Sandy Wong, MD, on Her Hopes for Patients with Myeloma

Sandy Wong, MD, of the University of California, San Francisco hopes to see patients with myeloma gain greater access to new and novel therapies for the disease.

“In the coming years, immunotherapy—using a patient’s own immune system to get rid of myeloma—is going to be so important,” she said. “All the new drugs—at least most of the new drugs—being developed for myeloma are really different ways of utilizing the immune system to get rid of this cancer.”

Dr. Wong has been glad to see the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approve new treatments for myeloma in recent years, such as chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapies, and the bispecific antibody teclistamab.

“It’s really, really exciting because all these therapies have a very high response rate,” she said.

However, there are considerations and challenges to address.

“We do need immunotherapy treatments that are readily accessible to patients,” she said. “I think access is going to be so important.”

For example, CAR-T therapies are “very limited in terms of their availability for our patients,” Dr. Wong said, noting that manufacturing challenges often play a role in limited access to CAR-T.

“I would really love to be able to give access to this treatment to all myeloma patients that are eligible for it,” she said. “But right now, that that is still a work in progress, and I think that’s going to require a lot of folks—not just from the academic centers, but also from patient advocacy groups, as well as obviously the industry—to try to get together and come up with good solutions.”

While teclistamab is available as an “off-the-shelf” therapy, its recent approval means many health care providers are still working to “reorganize their workflow to be able to give it to patients,” she said.

“I think accessibility is going to be very important in the next two years,” Dr. Wong said.