On Mar. 26, 2021, Bristol Myers Squibb and bluebird bio announced that the FDA had approved Abecma (idecabtagene vicleucel; ide-cel) as the first B-cell maturation antigen (BCMA)-directed chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cell immunotherapy for the treatment of adult patients with relapsed or refractory multiple myeloma.

Abecma is a personalized immune cell therapy approved as a one-time infusion with a recommended dose range of 300 to 460 x 106 CAR-positive T cells.1 As an anti-BCMA CAR T cell therapy, Abecma recognizes and binds to BCMA, a protein that is nearly universally expressed on cancer cells in multiple myeloma, leading to the death of BCMA-expressing cells.