As new treatments for multiple myeloma have extended patient survival—from an average of three years to more than 10 in some cases—physicians and researchers face a new challenge: how to predict a drug’s long-term effectiveness? How to tell, early on, whether one drug is likely to extend patients’ lives more than another?
At Dana-Farber’s Jerome Lipper Multiple Myeloma Center, researchers have identified one such sign. In a study published in the journal Blood, investigators found that, after treatment, patients with no myeloma cells within 1 million bone marrow cells were more likely to have a lengthy remission than those with higher myeloma cell counts. They propose that the less-than-one-in-a-million level—formally known as an absence of “minimal residual disease” (MRD)—be adopted as the new standard for managing myeloma and evaluating myeloma drugs.
Read more here: https://blog.dana-farber.org/insight/2018/12/myeloma-study-makes-the-case-for-a-new-standard-for-predicting-long-term-outcome/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=hm&fbclid=IwAR1ogvdwc3QtY_Go4vgEuhUvhfFb4akv9DW6G0trlEBZo5kJVP0qqnJLUJs