Blue­bird, Cel­gene jump off to a promis­ing start in the marathon race to de­vel­op a CAR-T for mul­ti­ple myelo­ma

The clin­i­cal race to de­vel­op a rel­a­tive­ly safe BC­MA-tar­get­ing CAR-T for mul­ti­ple myelo­ma is un­der­way, and it’s start­ing with a pre­lim­i­nary Po­laroid af­ter the first few promis­ing paces out of the gate for a hand­ful of pa­tients treat­ed with bb2121 by blue­bird bio $BLUE.

The biotech, part­nered with myelo­ma pow­er­house Cel­gene $CELG, of­fered up a clear­ly pos­i­tive ear­ly snap­shot show­ing that 7 of 9 evalu­able pa­tients re­spond­ed to the ther­a­py, with two com­plete re­spons­es, one near­ly com­plete re­sponse and four par­tial re­spons­es in­di­cat­ing that more than half of their tar­get­ed pre­can­cer­ous cells had been elim­i­nat­ed. And in a field that has man­aged to raise re­peat­ed red flags on safe­ty, blue­bird was clear­ly chuffed that in­ves­ti­ga­tors so far had seen none of the dam­ag­ing side ef­fects that has plagued the CAR-T field from its ear­li­est days.

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