Engineering more efficacious antibody therapy for myeloma.

In this issue of Blood, Tai et al describe a novel monoclonal antibody (mAb) for myeloma, which is both glycoengineered and conjugated to a cytotoxic agent. This mAb targets B-cell maturation antigen (BCMA) and has considerable preclinical activity, thus holding therapeutic promise. The outlook for myeloma patients has greatly improved over the past decade with the introduction of a number of novel agents. However, there is still a significant unmet need because many patients with gene expression profiling–defined good-risk disease eventually relapse and high-risk myeloma has poor long-term disease-free survival in the majority of patients.