What is the PROMISE study?

What is the PROMIS study? The PROMIS study is asking for the first question, if I am at high risk of developing myeloma, if my brother or sister or my mom had myeloma and I might be having a higher chance of developing MGUS or smoldering, why aren't we looking for it? And I know so many people come to me and say, I screen for breast cancer, I screen for colon cancer, we screen for cancer because cancer screening saves lives. Yet we don't do a simple blood test to look for a monoclonal protein. And I can tell you that it's much easier to get a blood sample than getting mammography or colonoscopy. So why aren't we doing it? And many people will say, well, if you diagnose MGUS, who cares? Those patients will never develop myeloma. But you can revert it and say, every single myeloma must have had an MGUS or smoldering. We know that. If you were diagnosed at age 60 or 50 with a bone fracture and you have myeloma, wouldn't it have been nice when you were age 40? You went to your primary care doctor, he pulled the blood sample and he said, oh, you have a smoldering myeloma. You will likely develop myeloma in the future. Let's do something about it. Let's observe you carefully. Let's prevent it in the future. So the whole idea was let's screen for the first time in the US a high risk population to try and see how many of them will truly have MGUS and smoldering. And can we now look at those patients and see who will progress to myeloma? And can we understand the mechanism of progression in those patients? And we said, let's screen African-Americans over the age of 40, as well as first degree relatives, any first degree relative Caucasian, African-American, as long as you're over the age of 40. What we found is actually as we're screening patients, the incidence of those patients having MGUS is much higher than what we consider. So we were thinking we will get maybe six, seven percent positive, screen positive from the cohort that we're screening. We're finding that we're getting into the 15 percent, 13, 15 percent are screen positive in our cohort. The Promise Study is all online. So you can go to promisestudy.org and wherever you live, you can just answer three or four questions. We then enroll you in the study. You don't need a physician. You don't need a consent form with a physician or in any office. We send the kit so it's all free and you go to a Quest Diagnostics or to any of your labs and we get the test done and we will call you if you're positive and we will send you an email if you're negative so that we can ask you to be re-screened again in three years. So it's simple. You can do it wherever you are. It's research level only, meaning it does not go in your chart. It does not change your insurance. When you're positive, we recommend that you go and see an oncologist and start the process of making sure that you follow carefully with someone so that you never develop myeloma in your lifetime.