VIDEO: What awareness means in the multiple myeloma community

Editor’s note: This is a previously posted video, and the below is an automatically generated transcript to be used for informational purposes. Please notify editor@healio.com if there are concerns regarding accuracy of the transcription.

The first thing that comes to mind for me in terms of awareness is really just the concept of all of us just continuing to always listen to each other. Now, I guess on the one hand, that means, our colleagues in the community would remain aware about all of the really promising investigational therapies on clinical trial that are available at the larger centers, like ours here in Boston, and really allowing their patients to become at least aware of these things that aren't yet fully proven, but maybe quite promising that could wind up being great therapies for them. So that's awareness in one direction, and then I guess in the other direction, I think it's important for us, myeloma investigators to remain aware of what's going on in the real world, I guess you could say, and to always be communicating with our colleagues in the community and getting reports and feedback about how our therapies, probably most specifically our newest therapies are really working out in the real world. Again, I think it's one thing for a drug or a combination of drugs to demonstrate safety and efficacy in a very controlled clinical trial environment. And I think that's the appropriate way for these therapeutic agents to gain approval, but it may be another thing entirely in terms of how things are working out in clinical practice in patients who aren't perfect trial candidates, or I guess, smaller kind of community hospital and oncology clinic-based settings. And I think it's important for us in academia to always remain aware of how things are actually going with the drugs that we've been working on for years and are excited about that, that to make it into the myeloma space and the community. I think it's very much a situation in myeloma specifically where we're just gaining more and more tools in the tool ship and I think that's a great thing and our weapons in the arsenal or, paints on the palette or whatever analogy you prefer. And I think that's a good thing. And I definitely think it's preferable to a choice between one or two drugs in each line of therapy. It's better to have multiple options with pros and cons and different toxicity profiles and whatnot. But as we get more and more options, I think it's important to remain aware of how patients are actually doing and what they're reporting and what the oncologists in the community are reporting in terms of how easy or not easy it is to give and to take these medicines. And what types of responses and tolerability we're seeing in the real world.