Meet the Speaker
Daejin Abidoye, MD, is Vice President, Therapeutic Area Head, Oncology, Solid Tumor and Hematology at AbbVie, where he oversees clinical development of the company's late-stage oncology assets.
Dr. Abidoye brings more than two decades of experience in oncology and drug development. Before joining AbbVie, he served as Therapeutic Area Lead for Oncology at Gilead Sciences, and his career also includes roles at Seattle Genetics and Roche-Genentech, along with clinical practice as a board-certified oncologist at Scripps Health in Southern California.
He earned his MD from the University of Lagos, Nigeria, and an MPH in Clinical Research from Temple University in Philadelphia. He completed his internal medicine residency at St. Elizabeth's Medical Center in Boston and a hematology and oncology fellowship at the University of Chicago.
The biggest practical hurdle with BCMA-directed bispecifics hasn’t been efficacy—it has been keeping patients tethered to academic infusion centers for intensive step-up dosing and monitoring. Etentamig was built to change that equation, and the phase 3 CERVINO data suggest that it may: a single step-up dose followed by every-4-week maintenance, cytokine release syndrome (CRS) in roughly 20% to 30% of patients with zero grade 3 or higher events, no severe immune effector cell–associated neurotoxicity syndrome (ICANS), and lower infection rates than what is typically reported for this drug class. That combination is what makes community-based administration a realistic option rather than an aspiration, which is relevant given that most patients with myeloma are diagnosed and treated outside major academic centers in the first place.
For pharmacy teams building monitoring protocols around this agent, 2 details stand out. First, infection risk is not flat over the course of treatment; it peaks in the first 6 months and then drops substantially, which argues for front-loaded surveillance (more frequent monitoring in the first 2 to 3 cycles) rather than sustained high-intensity monitoring indefinitely. Second, prophylactic tocilizumab use in the outpatient setting has been shown to drive CRS rates toward zero, providing practices with a concrete risk-mitigation tool when step-up dosing is being considered outside a hospital-based infusion suite. The trial also built in a path to treatment discontinuation for patients who reach a strong, sustained response—meaning this is not necessarily an indefinite therapy to plan chronic administration logistics around, but one with a built-in off-ramp that pharmacy teams will need to track alongside response and minimal residual disease data.
