The Role of Established Pharmaceutical Companies in Bringing Cell Therapy to Autoimmune Disease
Daniela van Eickels, MD, PhD, MPH, the vice president and head of medical affairs for Bristol Myers Squibb’s Cell Therapy Organization, also discussed the company’s planned presentation at ACR Convergence 2024.
This is the second part of an interview with Daniela van Eickels, MD, PhD, MPH. For the first part, click here.
Daniela van Eickels, MD, PhD, MPH
Over the past 1 to 2 years, many small biotech companies joined the race to bring chimeric antigen receptor T-cell (CAR-T) therapy and other cell therapy modalities to autoimmune disease. Although, some large, established pharmaceutical companies, such as Bristol Myers Squibb (BMS), have also thrown their hats into the ring.
CGTLive® interviewed Daniela van Eickels, MD, PhD, MPH, the vice president and head of medical affairs for BMS’s Cell Therapy Organization, about the company's plans for developing CAR-T products in autoimmune disease. She noted that BMS will be presenting data from 1 of its ongoing CAR-T trials in autoimmune disease at the 2024 American College of Rheumatology (ACR) Convergence, which will be held November 14 to 19, in Washington, DC. Van Eickels also discussed the importance of established players like BMS in pushing the field forward.
CGTLive: Are there any specific cell therapy products in development for autoimmune disease now that you can speak about?
Daniela van Eickels, MD, PhD, MPH: BMS has a robust development strategy in autoimmunity and we are currently exploring how we can bring designs to patients with severe respiratory lupus, to systemic sclerosis patients, to patients with inflammatory idiopathic myositis, but also to patients with neuroinflammatory diseases like multiple sclerosis. We have a lead candidate for this, this is CD19 NEX-T, which is a product that brings our experience from our best-in-class product, lisocabtagene maraleucel (liso-cel, marketed as Breyanzi), and the CD19 construct that we are using there, and a new manufacturing process that balances speed and reliability and aims to allow us to have even shorter turnaround time, increase capacity of the manufacturing, and also slightly adapt the cell composition of the final product in order to optimize patient outcomes. We currently have 2 multicohort studies underway with CD19 NEX-T, where we are investigating the safety and tolerability and effectiveness of CD19 NEX-T in patients with, on the one hand side, rheumatologic indications, like lupus, sclerosis, and myositis, and on the other hand, the neurologic field, in our case, different forms of multiple sclerosis.
Is there anything you can share about the data BMS will be presenting at the ACR Convergence in November?
We will be presenting our first disclosure of preliminary results from 1 of the studies: the rheumatology program. The data will be presented by our primary investigator, Georg Schett, MD, the vice president of research and a professor of internal medicine at Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany. The session will be part of the cellular therapy section on November 17, at 4pm. We are very excited that we have the expertise of Professor Schett as a primary investigator to the program, as he has already a lot of experience investigating the mechanism of a deep immune reset in autoimmune diseases, and we're very much looking forward to this presentation.
Is there anything else you would like to share with our audience?
I think, generally speaking, we are very, very excited about the concept of deep immune reset. It's something that we are driving with utmost urgency, knowing that there are currently patients that are really suboptimally treated. We hope that by accelerating [this approach] we will really bring a real value to those patients. This is something that we really need to execute together with scientific experts, clinicians, and the patients that go on our studies. This is where we see the biggest value of an established player like BMS bringing that all together and also using our expertise in cellular therapies from other areas.
This transcript has been edited for clarity.
