Hi, I'm Urvi Shah, a hematologist, oncologist, and physician scientist at Memorial Sloan Gatring Cancer Center. My interest is in looking at how modifiable risk factors like the diet, microbiome, metabolism, affect cancer risk, progression, and survival. We completed the pilot Neutrogen study where we enrolled patients with the precursor states of MGUS and smoldering myeloma with an elevated BMI and were able to show improvements in key metabolic markers and microbiome markers such as insulin resistance, weight, microbiome diversity, butrate producers, quality of life also improved, inflammation reduced, and we saw a shift in the metabolism, microbiome, and immune system in these patients. What's more is that we saw a delay in progression in some participants as well, suggesting that a low risk intervention such as this may be able to potentially delay progression. We did mouse model studies led by Dr. Matteo Bellone in Italy and what he shows is that in smoldering myeloma mice, mice who have smoldering myeloma, if they receive a high fiber diet, half the mice do not progress to myeloma, whereas the standard diet, all mice progress to myeloma. We have put all of this data in a manuscript that has just been published in Cancer Discovery, so there's lots more additional details in the paper and I encourage you to look at it if you're interested. To build on those studies, we have Neutrogen 2, which we're enrolling and recruiting for the next few months. If you're interested, as long as you have MGUS or smoldering myeloma and live anywhere within the United States, please reach out to the Health Tree Foundation because you can sign up directly from their site. It is a short two month study where we are studying the microbiome and you can do this from your home. You do not need to come in and we're looking at diet versus different supplements and there are four groups in that study. The sooner you enroll, the better given that we're keeping this open for a few more months. Neutrogen 3 is a study which is similar to the pilot Neutrogen in terms of it being a long study and patients are followed for one year on the study. That study is open at Emory University and Memorial Sloan Kettering, of course, and so we would love your participation. We've had patients come from other states as well and fly in or travel for it. It's spread, the travel visits would need to be about four to six visits spread over a year if patients are interested. If you're interested in any of these studies, please email schaafnutrivention at mskcc.org. We'll put that in the notes.
HealthTree • December 13, 2025