VIDEO: Future research in myeloma should focus on diagnostics, finding response biomarkers

Editor’s note: This is an automatically generated transcript. Please notify editor@healio.com if there are concerns regarding accuracy of the transcription.

I think, really, personalized medicine is what the field needs. So right now, really, the approach of all the field has been to add more drug upfront to try to get this deep response. Like, we have regimen that now has an overall response rate of like, 90%, 95% upfront, like the recent PERSEUS trial, the IMROZ trial, all these new trials. But still, we know that this is not going to cure the disease. We don't have predictive biomarker of response to specific drugs, and that can kind of lead to either overtreating patient or causing toxicities for patient that might not respond. And this is a big topic that we've been discussing with different providers, physician, or even community oncologists if like when do we stop? How we decide the patient that needs really four drugs? And now at this point, especially in community practice, I've been talking with the colleagues and they're like, we just use all four drugs, so we have the best response and then we'll figure out toxicity.

So, I think that all like this concept of like personalizing and finding biomarkers for response is really crucial. And then lead to that novel target, so in my lab we've been working a lot on specific chromosomal translocation and high-risk features. And the hope is really to be able to use some of these tools to bring new drugs to patients. And finally, another I think, important topic to mention is the need of having better diagnostic and prognostic tools. So multiple myeloma cells, they grow in the bone marrow. So our main way of detecting plasma cells, myeloma cells or even performing MRD testing remains doing bone marrow biopsies. Even though there start to be more and more tools that allows actually to look at either like circulating tumor cells or circulating tumor DNA or exosome directly from the peripheral blood or patient. So this is something that I really would like to see applied in the future and I hope will be one of the important topics for myeloma research as well.