I'm Ayma Zafrugh. I'm one of the myeloma faculty members at UT Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas, Texas. We are talking about a study that we did with the US Myeloma Immunotherapy Consortium. In this study, we look at how well TAL-Ketamab works for patients with relapsed affective myeloma, especially those with soft tissue disease, either extra medullary, which is disease not connected to the bone, or paraskeletal disease, which sits right next to the bone. These are some of the hardest form of myeloma to treat and real-world data are limited. We evaluated 378 patients. This was a very heavily treated group. About 80% had already received BCMA targeted treatment, and more than half had undergone BCMA CAR-T. In terms of safety, TAL-Ketamab was comparable between groups. Infections were a bit more common in patients with extra medullary disease, despite the comparable IVIGUs. Response rates were encouraging across all groups, but how long the treatment works before the myeloma progress was different depending on where the disease was located. Patients without a soft tissue plasmocytoma had a longer progression-free survival, about 7.5 months compared to around 4.4 months in paraskeletal disease and 3.8 months in extra medullary growth. But location alone didn't explain everything. We all know that not every extra medullary disease is the same. We also look at the inflammation in a body, especially ferritin level, which is a marker that was available for most of our patients. When we combined disease location with the ferritin level, a clearer picture emerged. Ferritin above 600 was linked with much shorter time before the disease came back, especially in the paraskeletal and extra medullary group. What was interesting is that when ferritin was low, patients with extra medullary disease had a better outcome compared to counterpart with a high ferritin or even compared to the patients without any soft tissue plasmocytoma with a high ferritin. This tells us that both where the myeloma is growing and how much inflammation the body has are important part of the risk. We also look at irradiation in extra medullary disease. Only about a third of the patients receive it and among those who did and responded, outcomes were better. Overall, extra medullary disease remain a high risk condition, but our findings suggest that inflammation, something we can potentially address, may be an important part of why outcomes are worse in some compared to others. This point towards the need for future studies to see whether combination of antimyeloma treatment with the treatment that reduce inflammation could help patients in this group. If our videos have helped you in any way and you're able to, please consider making a donation to help us continue this important work. Your gift will go three times as far when we reach $500,000 by the end of the year. Every contribution, big or small, makes a difference and we're deeply grateful for your support.
HealthTree