I’m Faith Davies, and I'm from NYU Langone Health in New York.
I've been presenting a slightly different abstract at this meeting. So not one related to treatment, but related to trying to identify myeloma patients early, because what we know is that many myeloma patients may have had their symptoms for a year or even two years before their doctor puts all of the pieces together.
And we know at that point that patients will potentially come in with bone fractures or kidney problems. And now we're having such great treatments. It's important to get patients as quickly as possible so that we can ensure that they can benefit from those therapies.
So what we've done is that we've looked at a claims database. So we've used US data and we've looked at over 4500 patients who've developed myeloma and who we have data on for the two years prior to them getting diagnosed.
And we've matched those patients to patients who are the same age, the same sex, and have the same kind of comorbidities hypertension, diabetes, and so on. And we've said what happens for the two years prior to their diagnosis. And can we identify any patterns that may be say, oh, we need to think about myeloma a year before they actually present?
And what's really interesting is that there are big differences. You can actually identify patients a year before they present.
Now some of the symptoms and signs and tests they have done are very logical. So, bone pain muscle aches anemia. But other ones were slightly more unusual.
So it appears that myeloma patients maybe visit their cardiologists more often. They also potentially visit their gastroenterologist and are more likely to have had an endoscopy to look to see if for a cause of their anemia or their Gerd. Whereas, individuals that don't have myeloma, they're more likely to be seeing, a health care professional for something else.
And so what we've been able to identify is this pattern. So it's probably not just one thing. It's a pattern of things.
And so importantly moving forward we can utilize that in kind of this big data that is artificial intelligence. And so what we're hoping to do now, having shown we can identify patients early, is to say, right, okay, let's design an algorithm that we could maybe utilize in patients electronic health care records that can identify patients a long time before they present to the doctor.
And it may be that hopefully what we could do is say, okay, patients who have this pattern, maybe they can be a pinged in their electronic records that goes to the PCP that says, hey, this patient's got a pattern of these symptoms. Have you thought about myeloma.
So that's where we want to take it. At the moment we're in the proof of principle that we can do it. But I think even that is a big step forward for, potential myeloma patients.
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HealthTree • December 19, 2025