Clinical Nurse Specialist
Hematology-Oncology-Bone Marrow Transplant
Associate Clinical Professor
Department of Physiological Nursing
University of California San Francisco Medical Center
San Francisco, California
What changes should we expect to see in the multiple myeloma landscape?
Hi, I am Carol Viele, and I am asked many times what changes will we see in the myeloma landscape over the next few years? What do we have to look forward to? What do the patients have to look forward to? Well, we know that there are a number of novel agents currently in clinical trials. Some of the ones that I am most familiar with are carfilzomib, perifosine, vorinostat, and pomalidomide. There are other agents that are on the horizon and many of you will be exposed to them in your daily clinical practice. What is going to happen in stem cell transplantation? We know that right now, we do autos. We certainly do autologous transplantation as a single autologous transplant. We use the tandem transplants where patients are given a transplant; six weeks later, brought back and then given a second transplant. And then there is the whole idea of maintenance therapy. How do we do maintenance therapy? What agent should be used for maintenance therapy? And if we use maintenance therapy, probably the biggest question out there is, will, in fact, we be able to prolong the remission, that we might, at one day, in the near future, be able to tell patients with multiple myeloma they have a disease that we can put in a protracted remission and potentially even mention, can we cure multiple myeloma? Can we treat it as a chronic disease and can patients remain disease-free as long as they continue on therapy? Those are the real questions. This is really what we have to look forward to in the near future, hopefully, for the myeloma patient. And this is where all of our efforts are directed, to attempt to make sure that patients are getting the very best in the treatment program.
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