Quebec studies offer new hope for multiple myeloma patients
Posted June 10, 2025 8:31 am.
Last Updated June 10, 2025 8:33 am.
Two new studies offer a glimmer of hope for patients with multiple myeloma, a particularly ruthless form of blood cancer, The Canadian Press has learned.
The first study showed that the immunotherapy treatment Carvykti allowed one-third of patients with relapsed or refractory multiple myeloma to achieve progression-free survival of five years or more after a single infusion.
The second study revealed improvements in progression-free survival and overall survival when treatment is initiated at an earlier stage of the disease.
“We take the patient’s immune cells (…) and teach them how to defend themselves against multiple myeloma,” explained Dr. Michel Pavic, a hematologist at the CIUSSS de Sherbrooke. “Then we reinject them into the patient so that the patient, with their own intelligent lymphocytes, can fight the cancer. It’s really something very sophisticated and complicated to do, but it’s very effective.”
Multiple myeloma is the second most common blood cancer in Canada, with about ten new diagnoses every day. It is currently an incurable disease, and a five-year period without progression or treatment is rare.
The medical community, Dr. Pavic explained, had little to offer these patients until the mid-1990s, when various drugs appeared on the market, increasing patient life expectancy from an average of two and a half years to about ten years today—a “considerable” increase, he estimated.
That being said, cancer, for the time being, always wins. The more treatments advance, the less effective the patient response becomes, “and we find ourselves helpless in the end, and patients end up dying,” said Dr. Pavic.
With Carvykti, he added, “for the first time, we have a molecule that’s arriving very late in our therapeutic arsenal.”
The patients who participated in these studies “had received three to five prior lines of treatment, so these are heavily pre-treated patients, refractory to several treatments,” Dr. Pavic recalled.
“We’re achieving spectacular response rates of over 85 per cent, over very long durations,” he rejoiced. “Half of the patients are still alive after five years, whereas historically, with conventional treatments, these patients would all have died within a year, but after five years, we have a third of the patients who haven’t even relapsed… it’s spectacular.”
And when we pass the four or five-year mark without a relapse, Dr. Pavic added, “we can wonder if these patients aren’t cured.”
The best strategy to use with Carvykti must now be considered, he said: should it continue to be used as a last line of treatment, after multiple interventions, or should it be administered at the onset of the disease?
Canadians currently do not have access to Carvykti due to various regulatory issues. The treatment received a Notice of Compliance with Conditions (NOC/c) from Health Canada in February 2023, and a Notice of Compliance (NOC) for a second indication in November 2024.
More than two years after Health Canada’s initial approval, negotiations are continuing with the pan-Canadian Pharmaceutical Alliance, an organization whose mandate includes “expanding access to clinically relevant and cost-effective treatments” and “providing medications at stable prices and lower costs.”
The bill currently amounts to several hundred thousand dollars, even if only one Carvykti infusion is required. Furthermore, Dr. Pavic said, this isn’t a treatment that can be given to just any doctor.
“It’s like an atomic bomb hitting the patient, it creates an inflammatory storm, (…) so it requires expertise for the first few weeks,” he emphasized.
We are therefore facing an “extremely difficult” situation for both patients and caregivers, Dr. Pavic concluded, “because everyone wants what’s best for the patient.”
“When you have a patient who knows they’re going to die within the year, and there’s a therapy that can potentially cure them or take them much, much further, it’s definitely very difficult for these patients,” he said.
Dr. Pavic was not compensated to speak to the media on behalf of Carvykti’s manufacturer, the pharmaceutical giant Johnson & Johnson.
–This report by La Presse Canadienne was translated by CityNews
