My name is Craig Hofmeister. I'm a clinical investigator at Emory University at the Winship Cancer Center, and I'm here to talk about an abstract that I'll be presenting tomorrow about a trial of an influenza vaccine, given in a randomized way to 165 patients here at Emory in 2019 and 2020.
The question is whether we can improve on a single influenza vaccination that we normally give patients at the beginning of the flu season and is supposed to last for the entire flu season. Unfortunately, myeloma patients, if they do respond, that response is only temporary, and by the end of the flu season, they're no longer protected.
So this trial was to see whether we could give a flu shot at the beginning of the flu season, two months later, and two months after that—three shots—when the normal practice is to give just a single vaccine. The vast majority of myeloma patients have an average age of diagnosis of 70 years old, so 70-year-olds or older, and they typically get a high-dose flu vaccine. In this trial, we're giving three high-dose flu vaccines instead of just one.
The trial took several years to gather all the laboratory data, and when it came back, it showed that three vaccines more than doubled the chances that patients would be protected against the flu by the end of the flu season, compared to just one vaccine. Ninety percent of the patients we enrolled had multiple myeloma. Some were on multidrug treatment, some were on Revlimid maintenance, and some were just on observation.
What we found is that daratumumab suppressed the ability of patients with a single vaccine to mount a response against influenza. Patients older than 70 also had a hard time mounting a good response to a single vaccine. However, if they got three vaccines, even the suppressive effect of daratumumab or their age didn't stop them from being fully protected against the flu.
The conclusion from our 165-patient study is that patients are best protected if they can get three flu shots spread across the entire flu season. This approach provides better protection against influenza pneumonia than getting a single vaccine.
Generally, if you get poked with a vaccine more than once, you're going to complain about it more than once. But other than some mild skin irritation or vaccine-related complications, there wasn’t much difference between the two arms.
HealthTree • December 13, 2024