Understanding Personalized Medicine for Myeloma
Understanding Personalized Medicine for Myeloma from Patient Empowerment Network on Vimeo.
Myeloma experts Dr. Omar Nadeem and Dr. Betsy O’Donnell discuss the personalized approach to treating myeloma and the factors that are considered when making care decisions.
Dr. Omar Nadeem is the Clinical Director of the Myeloma Immune Effector Cell Therapy Program and Associate Director of the Multiple Myeloma Clinical Research Program at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. Learn more about Dr. Nadeem.
Dr. Betsy O’Donnell is Assistant Professor of Medicine at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute specializing in Plasma Cell Disorders.
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Transcript:
Katherine Banwell:
Dr. Nadeem, as we begin our treatment discussion, would you define personalized medicine as it relates to myeloma care?
Dr. Omar Nadeem:
Yes. I think we’re getting better and better at really having a personalized treatment plan for each individual patient with multiple myeloma. I think Dr. O’Donnell defined before, we are identifying some of the markers where we have targeted therapy for, and we hope with time we’ll discover more and more targets that can truly lead to personalized medicine for individual patients.
Right now, though, we have a lot of approved therapies for multiple myeloma, and that list is getting longer and longer basically every month, it seems, nowadays. So, when we have so many tools in our toolkit, we then have to figure out, well, which strategy works for which patient? And the fact that we have effective therapies, we’re able to tailor how much of one particular therapy a patient may benefit from. So, some of the decisions that come into play is which medication should I combine for this patient which will lead to obviously disease eradication?
And then also, how much do I need to intensify that treatment? Do we need to think about doing a stem cell transplant or not? Yes or no?
There are lot of pros and cons, right? So, it’s a very personalized decision that we have, looking at the disease factors, but also a lot of personal factors because transplant interrupts life, and then we have to make sure that that fits with that particular patient’s lifestyle.
And then we talk about maintenance therapy. You know, that’s the therapy that is designed to kind of keep the disease away usually for many, many years for the majority of patients.
But what does that look like, right? Does that include just pills? Is it going to be shots plus pills? Is it going to be a combination, etcetera? So, we have all the discussions at each phase of myeloma, and we discuss with them about what the pros and cons are and how that may fit into their particular lifestyle.
Katherine Banwell:
Dr. O’Donnell, what factors do you consider when choosing a treatment approach?
Dr. Betsy O’Donnell:
So, I think you’ve heard from all of us that we really try to have an individualized approach. When we’re talking about multiple myeloma, one of the main factors that I think about is really kind of the overall wellness of the patient. Historically, we had different categories of transplant eligible, transplant ineligible.
And so that can influence some of the decisions. Really it comes down to what is it the person’s performance does? How well are they doing in their day-to-day life? And that really can dictate the intensity of the therapy. We know that age is just a number, it really is, so there are factors beyond that. What other medical problems do people have? What are the specifics of how well their kidneys are working?
And so the biggest thing that we can work with is the dose. In fact, we’ve had work that shows that using lower doses from the get-go in older patients allows almost identical outcomes, but really gives patients a tailored dose to where they are at that juncture in their life.
And so remember, myeloma is much more like a marathon, and so you have to set out at a pace that can be sustained. We treat people continuously. There’s an induction phase where we use a multiple drug combination, but beyond that, as Dr. Nadeem just said, they go on to maintenance, and that maintenance is indefinite. And so you have to set out at a pace or at a dose that you can sustain.
Different medications have different toxicity profiles, so if someone had, let’s say, cardiac or heart issues, we might steer away from some medications that may exacerbate those. So, every decision is individualized. It’s based on who the patient is, where they are in their life, what other medical problems they have, and what we think they will do best with over time, not just in a short timeframe.
