What attracted you to join Legend Biotech, and what is your vision for the company since being appointed CEO?

I attained my Ph.D. in Bio-organic Chemistry from Columbia University, and then I worked as a scientist at Schering-Plough in Research and Development. Eventually I decided to make a transition and became an equity research analyst on Wall Street, working for investment banks covering the US biotech industry. After 12 years on Wall Street, I came back to the industry and joined Legend Biotech as Chief Financial Officer in 2019 and become Chief Executive Officer in 2020. What drew me to the company was that I saw great potential in their BCMA-targeting T-cell therapy to change the way we treat multiple myeloma. I saw a great opportunity to be part of a company that was going to bring a potentially lifesaving therapy to patients. 

Legend Biotech aspires to be the world's leading cell therapy company. We have a commercial product that is now approved in the U.S., Europe, and Japan; three facilities that are under development to advance the manufacturing of our CAR-T therapy product around the world; and we have a team of approximately 1,300 people that include more than 300 R&D employees focused on cutting edge research in cell therapy. 

What does Legend Biotech’s research mean for the world of oncology as a whole, and what differentiates the company from competitors?

In the field of cell therapy, we are trying to harness the power of the patients’ own immune systems to fight cancer.

We take T cells from a patient's own blood and use advanced genetic engineering to put an antibody fragment on the surface of the T cells to enhance their disease fighting ability. CAR-T cells can be compared to putting a GPS on a missile: the T cells (the missiles) are enhanced by the antibody (the GPS) to seek cancer cells and then kill them directly. This is extremely exciting science. Cell therapy allows us to harness the power of our own immune systems and enhance it through antibody engineering in the fight against cancer, potentially prolonging and improving the quality of life for patients. 

CARVYKTI® (ciltacabtagene autoleucel; cilta-cel) is a cell therapy product that we have co-developed with Janssen Biotech, Inc. CARVYKTI® has been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to treat multiple myeloma patients who have already been treated with four prior lines of therapy, such as immunomodulators, proteasome inhibitors, and anti-CD38 antibodies, and then relapsed or became refractory to these therapies. 

A patient with myeloma has a life expectancy of approximately five years, and on average, about 13,000 Americans die from this cancer every year. In the CARTITUDE-1 clinical trial, we have demonstrated that even when a patient has failed all three main classes of earlier line therapies, more than half of patients treated with cilta-cel in the study did not experience disease progression at 28 months.

In the pivotal study, the drug was tested on 97 patients and showed that 98% of these patients had their tumor burden reduced, and we observed a stringent complete response rate of 83% - that means that the majority of patients achieved the best response possible following this treatment. These results give hope to those patients who have exhausted the three main classes of therapy (immunomodulators, proteasome inhibitors, anti-CD38 antibodies). We are also trying to bring CARVYKTI® into earlier lines of therapy. 

Multiple myeloma treatments are often times a cocktail of several therapies where the treatment period lasts from months to years; this is where CAR-T stands out. CARVYKTI® is a one-time infusion, which is desirable for many patients. 

In addition to Legend Biotech’s collaboration with Janssen, what are your plans to expand the company’s presence on the global market? 

Our scientists are continuously working on the development of new cell therapy in both solid tumors and allogeneic approaches. The size of the populations suffering from solid tumors, such as lung cancer, breast cancer or prostate cancer, is 10 times larger than populations with hematologic cancers, such as lymphoma, myeloma, and leukemia. There is still a great unmet medical need in the solid tumor market, and Legend Biotech is working tirelessly to see whether cell therapy can effectively treat these types of malignancies. We currently have programs in the clinic investigating the potential of cell therapy for treating gastric cancer and small cell lung cancer. 

CARVYKTI® is an autologous therapy, which means we collect T cells from a patient’s own body. It takes time to genetically engineer those T cells before they go back to the patient. We are looking to improve on that and venture into the allogeneic cell therapy space - that means using cells from healthy donors to create an “off-the-shelf” therapy that can be used in many patients. If we are successful, then it will lead to shorter delivery time to patients. 

What are the prospects which arise from working with strategic partners, such as Janssen? 

The collaboration agreement between Legend Biotech and Janssen benefits both parties. We can leverage the global infrastructure of Janssen, their expertise in clinical development and GMP manufacturing of complicated biologics, as well as their global commercial footprint. Janssen is benefiting from our scientific discovery and expertise in cell therapy. We have an extremely complementary and productive collaboration that leverages each company’s strengths. Drug discovery and development are lengthy, risky, and capital-intensive tasks and in collaborating, we can work together to bring an important therapy to market. 

What are Legend Biotech’s main objectives for the next few years? 

Our main objective is to transform scientific research performed in a lab into clinical candidates to be tested in real patients, with the ultimate goal of taking an FDA-approved therapy to market. We aim to advance our research and development in both the solid tumor and allogeneic therapy space, continuing to bring commercial therapies into the market. By bringing benefit and value to patients with our innovations, Legend Biotech has succeeded in rewarding our shareholders and investors, and we hope to continue on this path moving forward. We are focusing on science, what science can do for patients, and delivering the benefits of science through research and development.