VIDEO: Curative solutions an unmet need for multiple myeloma

As long as we don’t cure myeloma, I would say there is always an unmet need to cure that first, second, or tenth patient and eventually the hundredth patient because nobody, in our hope, should die from myeloma. I think if I put your question in two different ways, I do feel that we may be already curing myeloma in a certain proportion of patients. There are a number of patients now who have not relapsed, have remained in CR or MRD-negative status for 10 years and longer. We are not saying those are cured but, in my judgment, I think those patients, their myeloma may not be coming back and eventually we’ll be bold enough to say these patients are cured. However, still a large majority of the patients do die from myeloma. So, one of the unmet needs is a multiply relapsed patient. How do we treat? And that’s where the new drugs come about, so that’s one group. Highlighting that group is our high-risk patient population. Those patients, despite having all these good treatments — the bispecific CAR-T, this and that — those patients are still relapsing and unfortunately dying quickly, within 3 years or 4 years. That’s the most important unmet need where we need to find treatments where we extend the survival of this patient and help them live longer, etc. And then, finally, all said and done, we do want another different unmet need. Because a lot of our patients live very long now, the third unmet need is to see how we can provide them a normal quality of life — that they live their life without myeloma but do not have infectious complications, other problems. And so learning to overcome the side effects and other effects of the disease will be a non-myeloma-centric but quality-of-life-related, improvement-related focus in our research and in our work.