CD38

Before joining GenMav, he spent several years at Janssen.

There he became VP and head of experimental medicine and was notably very much involved in the development of their CD38 antibody, which became quite fundamental in the treatment of myeloma.

became a landmark example of antibody-based cancer therapy.

And now GenMab making a really significant push into head and neck cancers, an area that important advances have been made, particularly with immunotherapy, but where we still have substantial unmet medical needs.

I'm looking really forward to this one.

So before we get into GenMab and before we get into, you know, everything you're doing now, I mean, I'd love to hand things over to you just for a couple of minutes to talk a little bit more about your background.

You know, you did your PhD in, you know, sort of malignant B cells and immunoglobulin genes and sort of classic Hodgkin's disease, which sort of obviously laid the direction you went with the CD38 stuff, but also a lot of what you did around the corner here at Penn.

Tell us a little bit about your background and, you know, because it's a really interesting journey you've been on.

What makes this drug combination important to research in relapsed or refractory multiple myeloma?

Well, I think what's really interesting and important about the Excalibur relapsed refractory trial is that we know that triplets, which are combinations of either IMIDs, the older class, or proteasome inhibitors with an anti-CD38 have traditionally been a standard.

But they have certain toxicity and limited efficacy based on where we are in the modern world.

And while certainly bispecifics and CAR T cells are very exciting, they're not necessarily available to everybody.

And so we're going to start with some polling questions.

In a patient with CD38-exposed myeloma at first relapse, will you use a BCMA-directed therapy as first therapy? in first relapse? A, yes, I routinely reach for BCMA-directed therapy in this setting.

B, yes, but only in selected patients, only in those patients that have high risk or cases of patients that have a rapid progression.

Or C, no, I generally prefer to use a non-BCMA-directed option at first relapse.

So this is a very potent, effective regimen.

We're seeing an overall survival benefit here as well.

The caveat of this trial is most patients were not monoclonal anti-CD38 exposure refractory, very small population.

This is essentially a DERA or esotexamab naive population.