I'm Chrissy Baker. I'm a second year PhD student at University of Miami Miller School of Medicine and the Myeloma Institute and I'm here at ASH 2025. So in multiple myeloma, an important endpoint is minimal residual disease or MRD negativity. This is typically assessed using a single site bone marrow biopsy, but this is really invasive and it fails to capture the spatial heterogeneity of the disease. So to address those limitations, I asked whether we could just use a blood sample to assess disease status. Specifically, I wanted to look at whole genome sequencing of cell-free DNA. And so what this means is that there's fragments of DNA floating around in the blood and some are coming from the tumor. And so what we're able to measure is how much tumor DNA is in your blood. And what we found was that patients that had a greater proportion of tumor DNA floating around in their blood that was also associated with worse clinical outcomes, such as not being able to sustain MRD negativity and having worse progression-free survival. Those patients that had a higher tumor fraction were also more likely to have known genomic drivers of multiple myeloma. So this was really interesting because this is telling us that a blood sample or the cell-free DNA can inform on clinical outcomes and disease biology. After that, I asked whether we could use that blood sample and the cell-free DNA to assess MRD status. And what I found was by comparing the MRD status assessed from the plasma sample to the standard bone marrow sample, that we were able to recapitulate results in a majority of the samples. We still want to optimize our protocol so we can have greater concordance among the bone marrow and the plasma samples, but this was a really promising start to this. Lastly, I looked to see if we could track tumor fraction over time and what we found was that as disease progressed, tumor fraction increased. And so this is telling us that we're able to assess how disease progresses over time and potentially catch the disease earlier before it progresses all the way. And so from all of this, we're able to find that using cell-free DNA from a blood sample, we're able to assess on clinical outcomes, disease biology, MRD status, and disease progression. 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 • December 17, 2025