The BC­MA fren­zy: Track­ing the 37 drugs around the world rac­ing to over­take blue­bird bio and Cel­gene

Blue­bird bio’s bb2121 is sit­ting on top of a vol­cano of clin­i­cal ri­val­ry aimed at BC­MA.

Cur­rent­ly in an ad­vanced clin­i­cal tri­al, Nick Leschly’s biotech is in a vul­ner­a­ble lead po­si­tion as they hunt first mover ad­van­tage. In can­cer R&D, de­vel­op­ers can move fast. And com­ing in a close sec­ond can still po­si­tion you for suc­cess, as Mer­ck found out with PD-1 and Kite/Gilead proved with CAR-T.

But there’s no end of ap­petite among de­vel­op­ers will­ing to come in much, much lat­er. A whole new group is com­ing out of Chi­na that could end up com­modi­tiz­ing each of these fields.

To get a bet­ter lay of the glob­al land­scape here, I asked Jun Tang at the Can­cer Re­search In­sti­tute — who’s been run­ning a fas­ci­nat­ing ef­fort to stay on top of the full ex­plo­sion of I/O ac­tiv­i­ty — to scrape the data­base to see what’s ac­tu­al­ly in the clin­ic. He dis­cov­ered that there are 38 clin­i­cal-stage BC­MA-tar­get­ed agents in de­vel­op­ment — 27 CAR-Ts, 6 CD-3 tar­get­ed bis­pecifics, 3 an­ti­body-drug con­ju­gates and a sin­gle nov­el cell ther­a­py and mon­o­clon­al an­ti­body.

You can see the full chart be­low.

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