What should patients know about the latest myeloma research? Dr. Rebecca Silbermann discusses advances in myeloma treatment and how researchers are working to better tailor therapy to each patient’s individual needs and disease characteristics.
Dr. Rebecca Silbermann is an Associate Professor of Medicine and the Clinical and Research Head of the Multiple Myeloma Program at Oregon Health & Science University. Learn more about Dr. Silbermann.
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Transcript
Katherine Banwell:
Dr. Silbermann, are there other advances in myeloma research and treatment that patients should know about?
Dr. Rebecca Silbermann:
The decision about when to move to CAR is not as cut and dry as it could be because we do have many other types of treatments that can be extremely effective, and there’s good and bad with each different type of treatment. The bispecific antibody treatments, the newer FDA-approved agents, all of them have a lot of promise.
And I think that it’s still an open question as to when CAR T should be considered for individuals, particularly individuals who might be younger than most myeloma patients, or individuals who might be a little bit older. I think there’s a lot of quality-of-life considerations to talk through.
Katherine Banwell:
Dr. Silbermann, are researchers improving their ability to identify which treatment will work best for an individual patient?
Dr. Rebecca Silbermann:
Yes, but it’s still slow-going. We think that we’re getting better at classifying patients as having higher-risk disease or standard-risk disease. We still have some cases where we’re fooled. We think that an individual has standard-risk disease, but their myeloma doesn’t behave in a way that would fit with that classification.
And so, we’ve come to recognize that there are a group of patients who have what we call functional high-risk disease, where their disease behaves poorly. It initially might respond, but then, it’ll come back faster than we would expect it to. We aren’t doing great at finding those patients from the beginning, but I think we’re getting better at thinking about what those next treatments should be for each individual.