Tag Archive for: pomalidomide dex

Should You Push for a Stronger Myeloma Treatment at Relapse?

Should You Push for a Stronger Myeloma Treatment at Relapse? from Patient Empowerment Network on Vimeo.

Should myeloma patients consider choosing a more aggressive treatment at relapse? Expert Dr. Jeffrey Matous explains the revised approach to choosing treatment at this stage and shares examples of second-line therapies that may be options for relapsed patients.

Dr. Jeffrey Matous is a myeloma specialist at the Colorado Blood Cancer Institute and the assistant chair in myeloma research for Sarah Cannon Research Institute. Learn more about Dr. Matous.

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Transcript:

Katherine:

Kendall writes, “I’m in the maintenance stage following initial diagnosis and treatment. At first relapse, is it appropriate to push for stronger treatment in hopes of a cure?” 

Dr. Jeffrey Matous:

Yeah, so the answer to that has changed. The answer is yes, and so, the – it used to be said in myeloma that your best treatment was your first treatment. Then, if you relapsed, that the treatments didn’t work as well, and the remissions did not last as long. Throw it out, so now, we get multiple chances to get really deep remissions in patients, and we should be every bit as greedy when we’re treating relapsed disease, at least initially, as we are when we treat disease at the very beginning. We know, for example, that there are many second-line therapies. I’ll just throw out some examples – daratumumab (Darzalex), pomalidomide dex, daratumumab, Revlimid dex, daratumumab Velcade dex.  

Not to mention, the T-cell therapies that can put patients in remissions that are so deep that we can’t even find myeloma cells using very sophisticated molecular techniques, so be greedy.