Key Factors That Guide Myeloma Treatment Decisions

Key Factors That Guide Myeloma Treatment Decisions

Key Factors That Guide Myeloma Treatment Decisions from Patient Empowerment Network on Vimeo.

Treatment for myeloma varies from one patient to the next. Dr. Joshua Richter, a myeloma specialist, reviews the factors that are considered when choosing a treatment approach.

Dr. Joshua Richter is director of Multiple Myeloma at the Blavatnik Family – Chelsea Medical Center at Mount Sinai. He also serves as Assistant Professor of Medicine in The Tisch Cancer Institute, Division of Hematology and Medical Oncology. Learn more about Dr. Richter, here.

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Transcript:

Katherine:

What I would like to look at is because everyone’s different, what’s going to work for one patient might not work for another. So, how do you choose which treatment is right for a patient? 

Dr. Richter:

Really great question. So, unfortunately, myeloma, we don’t have the granularity just yet to say exactly what’s going to work for everyone. Our goal is to kind of be what I like to think of as urinary tract infections. You have a UTI, you pee on a dish, we put little discs of antibiotics and a couple of days later, we’re like, “You have an E. coli and Cipro will work.” You get the Cipro, and it goes way. We don’t really have that outside of a few drugs. We do know that the drug venetoclax (Venclexta) works really well in people who have a very specific type of translocation in their myeloma cells, something we call translocation (11;14).  

But for the most part, we don’t know, and we have lots of options and we decide what drugs to use based on three factors: disease-related factors, treatment-related factors, patient-related factors. So, patient-related factors. Are you older or younger? Fit or frail? Do you have comorbidities? If you have a lot of neuropathy from diabetes, I don’t want to give you a drug that’s going to cause more neuropathy. If you have a lot of cardiac issues, I’m not going to give you a cardiac drug. Disease-related factors. Is your disease growing fast or slow? Can I give you some pills or do I need to give you intravenous immediately to stop it? Is it pressing on a nerve? Do I need to add radiation?  

So, those are some of the big factors. And then, treatment-related factors. Have you had certain other drugs? So, if you’re refractory to lenalidomide (Revlimid), I may not want to give you Revlimid again. 

If you have a lot of side effects or didn’t respond well to Revlimid, I may not want to use another drug similar to Revlimid like pomalidomide (Pomalyst).  

I may want to choose another class. So, that’s kind of putting all of that together to come up with a treatment choice because there’s no clear guideline.