With Sanofi en­ter­ing the mul­ti­ple myelo­ma mar­ket, J&J flash­es da­ta on new rare dis­ease

Since its 2015 ap­proval, Darza­lex has earned J&J bil­lions as one of the most po­tent drugs avail­able for mul­ti­ple myelo­ma, a com­mon can­cer that for years had few good ther­a­pies. Now, as Sanofi en­ters with a sim­i­lar drug, the com­pa­ny is edg­ing clos­er to ex­pand­ing its us­es.

Most no­tably, they have been test­ing the drug on AL amy­loi­do­sis, a rare and po­ten­tial­ly fa­tal dis­ease in which B cells pro­duce mis­shapen an­ti­bod­ies. These ab­nor­mal an­ti­bod­ies scrunch to­geth­er to form clumps called amy­loid (sim­i­lar to the plaques im­pli­cat­ed in Alzheimer’s but with dif­fer­ent pro­teins), which can build up in a num­ber of or­gans and pre­vent them from func­tion­ing prop­er­ly. Pa­tients live a me­di­an of 6 months to 3 years af­ter di­ag­no­sis. There are no specif­i­cal­ly ap­proved ther­a­pies, but some pa­tients al­so have mul­ti­ple myelo­ma — al­so a B cell ma­lig­nan­cy — and doc­tors have tried us­ing drugs de­vel­oped for the can­cer as a treat­ment.

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