What are the challenges and unmet needs associated with managing multiple myeloma today?

FAQ Library published on August 11, 2022
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Joshua Richter, MD
Assistant Professor of Medicine
Tisch Cancer Institute
Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai
Director of Myeloma
Blavatnik Family Center at Chelsea Mount Sinai
New York, New York

Myeloma in its current iteration and our approaches remains an incurable disease. Really when it comes down to it, the global unmet need is to find a cure. At a more pragmatic day-to-day level, the unmet need is dealing with people who have relapsed multiple times. We refer to patients with newly diagnosed myeloma as having high-risk or standard-risk by cytogenetics. We know that high-risk patients genetically do worse. Once you've relapsed beyond a few lines of therapy, or more specifically become relapsed and refractory to IMiDs, PIs, and monoclonal antibodies, you enter a realm of functional high-risk where even if you don't have a 17p or a 1q or a 4;14, the fact that there are more drugs behind you than in front of you means that you are functionally high-risk, and this is really the core area that we are currently focusing on a lot of our research efforts to maximize outcomes for patients who, at the current time, have very few options.

Last modified: August 8, 2022
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