I'm Natalie Callender from the University of Wisconsin and here at the IMS meeting. There has been just some very interesting updates on a couple of things that I'd just like to mention. One is I think of particular relevance to everyone, all of our myeloma patients. And this morning we heard some data on responses to COVID vaccination. I think many people know that certain patients who are receiving treatments such as anti-CD38 antibodies and perhaps CAR-T or other anti-BCMA therapies are looking like they may be more vulnerable to COVID infections and there was some very interesting data presented by Dr. Turpos looking at responses to vaccines. So one of the big take home messages that I got from this, really important to have the third and the fourth vaccine if you're on chemotherapy. It just seems like it will help responses. Now unfortunately we are seeing lower responses to the variants such as the BA5, but it still looks important to do that. And I think that we're really learning that there is a big difference in terms of responses depending on what therapies people have. One of the other very interesting things that came up on the first day of the meeting was an update on what's called the iSTOP myeloma trial that is going on in Iceland. And this is really an amazing undertaking where they asked approximately 150,000 residents in Iceland to be screened for MGUS, monoclonal gammopathy of unknown significance. And they got a very high participation rate, slightly over half of the participants, about 75,000 people agreed to do this and they're splitting them up into groups of just not actually informing them that they have MGUS, talking to people if they have MGUS and following the current guidelines and then actually potentially an intervention group. And one of the very interesting observations that was made is they found an incidence of smoldering myeloma of 0.5% in their participants over the age of 40, which is really a number that we've not heard before and I think probably higher than we all expected to see. So this study is expected to give us very interesting data over the next probably five to ten years. We don't know how applicable this will be to other populations in the world. Iceland has a fairly homogenous genetic pool, but I think this is very interesting and just fascinating that they could have that level of participation. I think another thing I would just like to comment on, there was a lot of discussion again on the first day about looking at things like circulating plasma cells. So these would be myeloma cells in the blood that you could measure and using that to predict both progression and maybe response. And so I think that there is more hope than I've ever heard about being able to use blood testing to monitor people as they go through therapy, which I think is again something that we would all like to see come to fruition.
HealthTree • September 9, 2022