How Do Bispecific Antibodies Work?
- Bispecific antibodies are a type of immunotherapy — they help your immune system fight your lymphoma
- The treatment contains two arms — one attaches to your cancer cell, and the other attaches to your immune cell to bring the two together
- It doesn’t require removing your cells and altering them, which makes it less time consuming than another type of immunotherapy called CAR T-cell therapy
Cancer research is progressing at a rapid pace, which is good news for anyone newly diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma. One new treatment under investigation, called bispecific antibodies, helps guide your cancer-fighting immune cells directly to your lymphoma. It’s the latest of many high-tech tools oncologists have against this cancer.
“You can’t have too many tools in your toolbox,” Dr. Stephen Schuster, medical oncologist at Penn Medicine, tells SurvivorNet. “Because every patient’s situation is so unique, and you don’t know when you’re going to have to fall back, or fall forward on something else.”
An Off-the-Shelf Approach
Bispecific antibodies are a type of immunotherapy, meaning that they help your own immune system fight your cancer. They join a field of treatments that includes CAR T-cell therapy. In CAR T-cell therapy, your own cancer-fighting T cells are removed from your blood and genetically modified to help them find your cancer before being returned to you.
The disadvantage to CAR T-cell therapy is that it is a time-consuming process. And when you have a cancer that is growing, time is of the essence.
Bispecific antibodies are “an off-the-shelf approach to using the body’s immune system to treat cancer,” Dr. Schuster says. “That means there’s no need to collect a patient’s cells and do gene therapy on them to direct them against the cancer.”
What Are Bispecific Antibodies?
Antibodies are proteins your immune system releases. They hunt down other proteins known as antigens that reside on the surface of foreign cells such as viruses, bacteria, and cancer, and target them for attack. In your body, this process doesn’t always work smoothly, and cancer can sometimes gain a foothold as a result.
Bispecific antibodies bring your immune cells to your cancer. They contain two arms. One arm binds to the antigen on the surface of the cancer cells, while the other arm binds to T cells. “They’re capable of dragging your normal immune system cells, your T-cells to your malignant B-cells, and doing what a CAR T-cell does, killing it,” Dr. Schuster explains.
Putting This New Treatment Into Practice
Bispecific antibodies are still under investigation in clinical trials, but Dr. Schuster is hopeful that they will be available within one to two years. Currently, this treatment is often used in the fourth-line setting after people have tried and failed to respond to three other treatments, including CAR T-cell therapy.
He thinks this treatment will soon be used in much the same way as CAR T-cell therapy is today, for people who have tried two other treatments. It’s possible that bispecific antibodies might be used even earlier in the course of the disease, in people who’ve only been on one other treatment.
He’s excited at the prospect of being able to pull a manufactured treatment off the shelf, “and be able to immediately treat somebody with it and not have any period of time to let the tumor take hold, or cause any compromise to the patient that might interfere with the success of their therapy.”
Dr. Schuster stresses that bispecific antibodies aren’t likely to replace CAR T-cell therapy entirely, but they may be helpful for people who haven’t responded to it. He’s also used bispecific antibodies as a bridge, giving patients more time so they have a chance to get to CAR T-cell therapy.
For now, if you’re interested in trying bispecific antibodies, the only way to do that is by enrolling in a clinical trial. Ask the oncologist who treats your cancer if a clinical trial might be appropriate for your situation. Before you sign up, find out how this treatment might help your cancer, and what side effects it could potentially cause.
Learn more about SurvivorNet's rigorous medical review process.
Dr. Stephen Schuster is a medical oncologist and director of the Lymphoma Program at Penn Medicine. He is also the Robert and Margarita Louis-Dreyfus Professor in Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia and Lymphoma Clinical Care and Research. Read More
How Do Bispecific Antibodies Work?
- Bispecific antibodies are a type of immunotherapy — they help your immune system fight your lymphoma
- The treatment contains two arms — one attaches to your cancer cell, and the other attaches to your immune cell to bring the two together
- It doesn’t require removing your cells and altering them, which makes it less time consuming than another type of immunotherapy called CAR T-cell therapy
Cancer research is progressing at a rapid pace, which is good news for anyone newly diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma. One new treatment under investigation, called bispecific antibodies, helps guide your cancer-fighting immune cells directly to your lymphoma. It’s the latest of many high-tech tools oncologists have against this cancer.
“You can’t have too many tools in your toolbox,” Dr. Stephen Schuster, medical oncologist at Penn Medicine, tells SurvivorNet. “Because every patient’s situation is so unique, and you don’t know when you’re going to have to fall back, or fall forward on something else.”
An Off-the-Shelf Approach
Read More Bispecific antibodies are a type of immunotherapy, meaning that they help your own immune system fight your cancer. They join a field of treatments that includes
CAR T-cell therapy. In CAR T-cell therapy, your own cancer-fighting T cells are removed from your blood and genetically modified to help them find your cancer before being returned to you.
The disadvantage to CAR T-cell therapy is that it is a time-consuming process. And when you have a cancer that is growing, time is of the essence.
Bispecific antibodies are “an off-the-shelf approach to using the body’s immune system to treat cancer,” Dr. Schuster says. “That means there’s no need to collect a patient’s cells and do gene therapy on them to direct them against the cancer.”
What Are Bispecific Antibodies?
Antibodies are proteins your immune system releases. They hunt down other proteins known as antigens that reside on the surface of foreign cells such as viruses, bacteria, and cancer, and target them for attack. In your body, this process doesn’t always work smoothly, and cancer can sometimes gain a foothold as a result.
Bispecific antibodies bring your immune cells to your cancer. They contain two arms. One arm binds to the antigen on the surface of the cancer cells, while the other arm binds to T cells. “They’re capable of dragging your normal immune system cells, your T-cells to your malignant B-cells, and doing what a CAR T-cell does, killing it,” Dr. Schuster explains.
Putting This New Treatment Into Practice
Bispecific antibodies are still under investigation in clinical trials, but Dr. Schuster is hopeful that they will be available within one to two years. Currently, this treatment is often used in the fourth-line setting after people have tried and failed to respond to three other treatments, including CAR T-cell therapy.
He thinks this treatment will soon be used in much the same way as CAR T-cell therapy is today, for people who have tried two other treatments. It’s possible that bispecific antibodies might be used even earlier in the course of the disease, in people who’ve only been on one other treatment.
He’s excited at the prospect of being able to pull a manufactured treatment off the shelf, “and be able to immediately treat somebody with it and not have any period of time to let the tumor take hold, or cause any compromise to the patient that might interfere with the success of their therapy.”
Dr. Schuster stresses that bispecific antibodies aren’t likely to replace CAR T-cell therapy entirely, but they may be helpful for people who haven’t responded to it. He’s also used bispecific antibodies as a bridge, giving patients more time so they have a chance to get to CAR T-cell therapy.
For now, if you’re interested in trying bispecific antibodies, the only way to do that is by enrolling in a clinical trial. Ask the oncologist who treats your cancer if a clinical trial might be appropriate for your situation. Before you sign up, find out how this treatment might help your cancer, and what side effects it could potentially cause.
Learn more about SurvivorNet's rigorous medical review process.
Dr. Stephen Schuster is a medical oncologist and director of the Lymphoma Program at Penn Medicine. He is also the Robert and Margarita Louis-Dreyfus Professor in Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia and Lymphoma Clinical Care and Research. Read More
