SOHO Insider spoke with Toon Overstijns, CEO of Miltenyi Biomedicine, and Dr. Anna Wijatyk, CMO (USA) of Miltenyi Biomedicine, at the 66th American Society of Hematology (ASH) Annual Meeting and Exposition held in San Diego, California.
In the video interview, Overstijns and discuss interim results from the phase 2 pivotal Study (DALY II USA) evaluating zamtocabtagene autoleucel (zamto-cel) in patients with relapsed or refractory diffuse large B-cell lymphoma (DLBCL).
“This is highly promising efficacy data that will be further developed, with the totality of patients, in the future,” Dr. Wijatyk said during the interview.
The ASH abstract (#68) was noted as clinically relevant by the meeting organizers and was presented by Nirav Shah, MD, from the Medical College of Wisconsin in Milwaukee.
According to Dr. Shah and colleagues, “zamto-cel is an investigational autologous tandem CD20-CD19-directed non-cryopreserved CAR-T cell product administered as a fresh formulation.”
Skipping the cryopreserved step in producing zamto-cel decreases the manufacturing time, ensuring patients get treatment quicker.
“We believe that making chimeric antigen receptor (CAR)-Ts and CAR-T treatments globally accessible—and [to] advance medicine like this—that is one of the major goals we have of at Miltenyi,” Overstijns said.
In the ASH poster abstract, Dr. Shah and colleagues wrote, “Among the 59 evaluable patients at the interim analysis, there is encouraging activity and a favorable safety profile in DLBCL patients treated with zamto-cel,” noting that zamto-cel is unique in that the CAR-T “is administered as a fresh product with a short vein-to-vein time of 14 days with lymphodepletion initiated during the manufacturing process.”
