How Do Test Results Impact Myeloma Treatment Options?

How Do Test Results Impact Myeloma Treatment Options?

How Do Test Results Impact Myeloma Treatment Options?  from Patient Empowerment Network on Vimeo.

Myeloma expert Dr. Melissa Alsina reviews the test results that are taken into consideration when choosing a treatment approach for patients.

Dr. Melissa Alsina is an associate professor of medicine in the Blood and Marrow Transplant Program at Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa, Florida where she also serves as head of the Multiple Myeloma Transplant Program. Learn more about Dr. Alsina, here.

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Transcript:

Katherine:

We know that patients undergo testing when diagnosed. How do test results affect treatment choices? 

Dr. Alsina:

So, in general, we do a bone marrow, we check for the genetics of the myeloma cells, see what are the genes that are affected in the myeloma cells, and that helps us define myeloma as high-risk or standard-risk, and that can help us decide what treatment we want to give these patients. Unfortunately, it’s not totally well defined. 

I wish we could use that in a better way and there are drugs that could really target, but there is some information. We know, for example, that proteasome inhibitors are important for patients with high-risk myeloma, so we definitely try to include that in a patient that is high-risk, and the other thing is that patients that are high-risk, it’s even more important to get to that remission, so we’re going to push treatment to get there, treat these patients a little bit more aggressively. 

Other than that, depending on, for example, what are the blood counts – some patients have a lot of bone marrow involvement and their blood counts are very low. This is not common, but it happens, and so, when that happens, we might be more aggressive up front and give these patients more aggressive chemotherapy to clean the bone marrow before changing them to the more normal therapies because the treatments that we give, like Revlimid (lenalidomide), Velcade (bortezomib), Darzalex (daratumumab) can depress the counts, right? 

So we’re in that battle. The patients already have low counts, we give the treatment, the treatment lowers the counts further, so it’s hard to give these treatments in these settings. And then, the third thing that we take into account is kidneys. About 25 percent of the patients will have renal insufficiency when they are diagnosed. Some of these drugs, particularly the immunomodulatory drugs like the Revlimid are metabolizing the kidneys, so it’s very hard to dose these drugs when the patients have renal insufficiency. 

So sometimes, for these patients, we avoid the IMiDs up front. We give a different combination until the disease gets better, and then we introduce the IMiDs. We think these immunomodulatory drugs like Revlimid are super important in the treatment of myeloma, so we want to give them, but sometimes we have to delay starting them until the patient’s kidney function improves.