Bispecifics and allogeneics steal the spotlight from autologous CAR Ts

Standing out at this year's ASH meeting is a pair of growing threats to first-generation CAR T cell therapies: bispecific antibodies and allogeneic cell therapies. Gone are the days when autologous CAR Ts were the meeting’s golden child. Now the task is to show what can improve on CAR Ts, and to demonstrate ways of fixing their flaws, or advancing competing technologies that can leapfrog them.

BioCentury’s survey of the 4,780 abstracts from this year’s American Society of Hematology (ASH) annual meeting, which takes place Dec. 7-10 in Orlando, identifies 42 new and emerging targets and 19 compounds with first-in-human data (see “Emerging Immuno-Oncology Mechanisms at ASH2019”)...