Oct 23 (Reuters) – Bristol Myers Squibb on Friday disclosed a patient death in an early-stage trial studying its experimental CAR-T cell therapy.
Shares of the drugmaker were trading 2.5% lower in early trading.
The company said a patient with highly active relapsing multiple sclerosis, a central nervous system autoimmune condition, died of septic pneumonia.
The patient was a participant in the trial of Bristol Myers’s experimental cell therapy zolacabtagene autoleucel, or zola-cel, the company said.
After receiving a high-dose of a type of chemotherapy, the patient developed septic pneumonia and died the next day, 44 days after the CAR-T infusion. The patient developed delayed motor symptoms that did not respond to treatment with corticosteroids or intravenous immunoglobulin.
In September, the company said it was implementing a voluntary pause on studies for zola-cel, “out of an abundance of caution” as it reviews safety data, after Novartis paused eight clinical trials of an experimental cell therapy, called rap-cel.
(Reporting by Sriparna Roy in Bengaluru; Editing by Shinjini Ganguli)
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