Dr. Aaron Rapoport, MD on the progress and potential for T-cell and vaccine myeloma therapies

Learn about all myeloma happenings on the new Myeloma Crowd site: the first comprehensive site for myeloma patients and caregivers. Dr. Aaron Rapoport, MD University of Maryland Greenbaum Cancer Center Interview date: March 28, 2014 

Dr. Aaron Rapoport shares the progress being made on T cell and vaccine immunotherapy. T cell therapy is a way to use a patient's own immune system cells to target and eliminate myeloma cells, either by waking up and empowering T cells through engineering (called CAR T cells)  or using a vaccine to stimulate the T cells to do their job. He shares how transplant is being used to eliminate the myeloma cells and T cells are being used to build back up the immune system to prevent future infections, like pneumonia. Although T cells are being used traditionally in combination with transplant, he shares how this is being used even without transplant in a newly opened study at the University of Maryland and City of Hope clinics. He shares how he and others are carefully moving forward with T cell approaches in order to create targets that just hit the myeloma cells while sparing healthy cells. He describes how you can join a T cell study by knowing your HLA tissue typing, an easy test to obtain that is performed by major labs. This test tissue typing is typically used if a patient is trying to find a donor transplant match.     The live mPatient Myeloma Radio podcast with Dr. Aaron Rapoport