Multiple Myeloma Treatment: New Therapies vs Stem Cell Transplant

Saad Z. Usmani, MD, MBA, FACP, FASCO, chief of the myeloma service at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, delves into the development of new treatments for patients with multiple myeloma, specifically discussing how the continuous development of novel therapies has shaped the role of autologous stem cell transplant in this space.

Usmani explains that while high-dose chemotherapy and stem cell transplants have been the standard for many years, there has been a push for new therapies with less severe adverse effects. He highlights the promise of newer therapies like bispecific antibodies and chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapies, which may eventually replace high-dose chemotherapy as the first-line treatment for patients with multiple myeloma.

This topic was further discussed by Usmani during the Fifth Annual Miami Cancer Institute Global Summit on Immunotherapies for Hematologic Malignancies, hosted by Guenther Koehne, MD, and Miami Cancer Institute.

Transcription:

0:09 | I have been answering this question now for 15-plus years, and many people were doing this even before I got into the field. There is some historic context to that. Novel therapies started to make their way into myeloma back in the late 90s, early 2000s. The real question was, can you give the same depth of response to patients so that they do not have to go through high-dose chemotherapy and stem cell rescue, because their [adverse] effects and recovery time period after that is an involved process.

0:51 | Now, we have effective single-agent activity with bispecifics and CAR T-cell therapies. Despite the fact that we have tried to displace [autologous stem cell transplant] from the frontline setting, we have not been successful because [autologous stem cell transplant] sets a high bar, in terms of outcomes for patients. But the newer therapies may be able to replace autos, and that is where we are heading.