Key takeaways
• Johnson & Johnson is a worldwide leader in multiple myeloma therapies, with a portfolio that includes CAR-T cell therapies and bispecific antibodies, as well as other important options for this difficult-to-treat disease.• The company has set an aspirational goal to make multiple myeloma curable in the near future.
• Approximately half of the dozen new medications that have been approved for multiple myeloma in the past decade are Johnson & Johnson therapies.
• Jordan Schecter, M.D., leads the Disease Area Stronghold (DAS) at Johnson & Johnson that is developing more effective multiple myeloma treatments for patients around the world.
Jordan Schecter, M.D., grew up wanting to be a pulmonologist like his father. But during internal medicine training, he felt drawn to oncology.
“You would think it’s a very sad field, but there are so many happy moments when you tell patients they’re in remission or a treatment is working,” says Dr. Schecter, who is Vice President, Multiple Myeloma DAS Leader at Johnson & Johnson.
Back in 2014, those happy moments between Dr. Schecter and his patients with multiple myeloma were much less frequent. At the time, multiple myeloma was a devastating diagnosis with few effective treatment options. “I would be at a patient’s bedside with nothing else to offer except more chemo or hospice,” he recalls.
Multiple myeloma is a rare blood cancer that causes plasma cells, which are located in bone marrow, to become malignant and multiply out of control, crowding out healthy cells and damaging bones, kidneys and other organs.
When Dr. Schecter learned that Johnson & Johnson was testing a new targeted therapy for multiple myeloma, he cold-called the company and asked if the New York City hospital where he worked as a hematologist-oncologist could participate in the ongoing early phase clinical trial. While waiting for the study to open at the hospital, he decided to join the company instead.
“My first job with Johnson & Johnson was to be the study physician on a Phase 3 program,” he says. “The therapy got approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) the next year. Today, more than 700,000 people around the world have been treated with it.
“After that, I was the clinical lead for a new CAR-T therapy for multiple myeloma,” he says. “CAR-Ts are advanced therapies that work by removing a patient’s T cells, engineering them outside the body to recognize and attack cancer and then reinfusing the patient with those newly engineered cells.”
Every textbook around the world starts with ‘multiple myeloma is an incurable blood cancer.’ We hope that one day we can change that narrative.
The prognosis for the disease has significantly improved since 2014 when he joined the company, with a five-year survival rate of 62%.
“Johnson & Johnson has played a significant role in advancing the treatment of multiple myeloma,” says Dr. Schecter. “Twelve new medications have been approved for the disease in the past 10 years, approximately half of which are Johnson & Johnson therapies.”
Currently, the company has a leading portfolio of multiple myeloma therapies, including the two programs he worked on, in addition to bispecific antibody treatments that bind “fighter” T-cells to myeloma cells, destroying them.
With the help of these and additional treatments in the pipeline, Johnson & Johnson hopes to make multiple myeloma curable in the near future.
“Every textbook around the world starts with ‘multiple myeloma is an incurable blood cancer,’” says Dr. Schecter. “We hope that one day we can change that narrative.”
We spoke with Dr. Schecter about Johnson & Johnson’s leadership in the multiple myeloma treatment space, the company’s aspirational goal of making the disease curable and its commitment to healthcare professionals (HCPs) and patients in need.
Q:
How has multiple myeloma treatment evolved over the course of your career?
A:
Twenty years ago, survival with treatment used to be two or three years. Now, some patients can measure their survival in 10 or more years, and there are more options than ever before.
It’s staggering how much Johnson & Johnson has contributed to better therapies for myeloma. And it’s very gratifying, because although most patients do, unfortunately, relapse and need additional therapy, they now have many more options that can really make a difference in their lives.
Q:
We’ve seen Johnson & Johnson therapies move into earlier lines of treatment. Why is earlier treatment so important in multiple myeloma?
A:
Data shows that patients often do better when they are treated earlier in the treatment paradigm. We know that myeloma becomes harder to treat with every relapse, and as patients move through successive lines of therapy, we see responses become shorter and less complete. That’s largely because the immune system becomes increasingly exhausted, the cancer becomes more genetically complex and treatment resistance can emerge.
At Johnson & Johnson, we have a targeted monoclonal antibody for frontline therapy. It attaches to a protein that’s expressed on myeloma cells, either directly targeting them or enabling the immune system to destroy them.
We have other therapies that engage T-cells in different ways and some of these regimens are approved as early as after first relapse, meaning second line or later.
Q:
Why does Johnson & Johnson have so many treatment options in its portfolio?
A:
Getting additional options for patients is critical because of what we call “clonal evolution.” As a person gets exposed to more and more treatments, their multiple myeloma becomes more genetically complex and more difficult to treat.
You also need to use medications that have complementary mechanisms of action. Rather than doing drug A, drug B, drug C, drug D, you do ABCD altogether. That’s how we treat lymphoma, breast cancer, hepatitis and HIV—we use medications that can potentially be combined together.
Given the relapsing/refractory nature of multiple myeloma, we’re continuing to expand the available treatment options to match the right treatment to the right patient and stage of disease.
Q:
How can academic and community HCPs work together to improve access to multiple myeloma treatment?
A:
Academic centers often help generate and interpret complex clinical evidence and introduce new treatment approaches, while community oncologists provide ongoing, personalized care closer to the patient’s home. Continuous dialogue between these teams helps ensure treatment decisions are aligned with both the latest evidence and individual patient needs.
Together, this partnership helps translate innovation into real‑world impact for patients across the care continuum. Because multiple myeloma is a difficult-to-treat, relapsing, refractory disease, and it often manifests differently across patients and lines of therapy, it’s important to have multiple options to treat the disease.
We’ve designed our portfolio with the intent of giving HCPs options for every patient at every line of therapy.
Q:
What is the one thing HCPs should understand about treating multiple myeloma today?
A:
Multiple myeloma has evolved so much over the past 10 years that it can be hard to stay up to date on the latest treatments. But this rapid advancement is bringing hope to patients and HCPs alike.
I know from experience that HCPs have an incredible amount of competing priorities. At the same time, next to your interaction with patients, staying current on the latest innovations is one of the most important things an HCP can do.
We’re lucky that today there are many more advanced options than there were 10 years ago. We’re continuing to advance the science so that number grows.
