Setting a Foundation for CAR T-Cell Therapy: Mounzer Agha, MD

Video

The director of the Mario Lemieux Center for Blood Cancers at UPMC Hillman Cancer Center discussed how the meeting sets the foundation for what’s to come in the treatment of multiple myeloma and other hematologic malignancies.

This content originally appeared on our sister site, Cancer Network.

Cancer Network spoke with Mounzer Agha, MD, University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine Hillman Cancer Center, at the 2021 American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) Annual Meeting about the value of the conference for multiple myeloma. He detailed the importance of investigators converging to discuss the future of treatment across tumor types.

Transcription:

ASCO, along with [the American Society of Hematology Annual Meeting] and the European Hematology Association [Congress], is a representative benchmark where we really set the foundation for what’s to come in the next year and the years to come. What we hope to accomplish at this ASCO is to set the foundation for treatments that were [once] viewed as applicable only for last-line therapy [and apply them to] earlier treatment settings safely. In the field of multiple myeloma, we are still discussing the role of high-dose melphalan in autologous stem cell transplant. This role has gone unchallenged now for a couple of decades and if you really think about it, it is not a curative treatment. It does lead to an improvement in survival and disease control, but it does not represent a long-term solution for patients with multiple myeloma. CAR T[-cell therapy] offers the hope of long-term disease control and perhaps cure in a subset of patients [with multiple myeloma]. What we demonstrate this time is that you can offer this treatment effectively and safely. This represents a paradigm shift and ASCO is the venue that we would like to disseminate this to the public and to other physicians.

Reference
Agha ME, Cohen AD, Madduri D, et al. CARTITUDE-2: Efficacy and safety of ciltacabtagene autoleucel (cilta-cel), a BCMA-directed CAR T-cell therapy, in patients with progressive multiple myeloma (MM) after one to three prior lines of therapy. J Clin Oncol. 2021;39(suppl 15):8013. doi:10.1200/JCO.2021.39.15_suppl.8013
Recent Videos
Barry J Byrne, MD, PhD, the chief medical advisor of MDA and a physician-scientist at the University of Florida
Barry J Byrne, MD, PhD, the chief medical advisor of MDA and a physician-scientist at the University of Florida
Sarah Larson, MD, the medical director of the Immune Effector Cell Therapy Program in the Division of Hematology/Oncology at David Geffen School of Medicine at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)
David Porter, MD, the director of cell therapy and transplant at Penn Medicine
David Porter, MD, the director of cell therapy and transplant at Penn Medicine
Georg Schett, MD, vice president research and chair of internal medicine at the University of Erlangen – Nuremberg
Manali Kamdar, MD, the associate professor of medicine–hematology and clinical director of lymphoma services at the University of Colorado
Manali Kamdar, MD, the associate professor of medicine–hematology and clinical director of lymphoma services at the University of Colorado
Ben Samelson-Jones, MD, PhD, assistant professor pediatric hematology, Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania and Associate Director, Clinical In Vivo Gene Therapy, Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia
Related Content
© 2025 MJH Life Sciences

All rights reserved.