What is the PCrowd study?

What is the PCrowd Study?

PCrowd, which is a precursor crowd sourcing. And this came from an idea of let's actually have everyone empowered by being part of the research study. And the idea was we see so many people with MGUS and smoldering who say, I want to be part of this. I want to understand how to prevent progression. And we said instead of having them come to Dana Farber or having them go to a local doctor, let's change the way we do clinical trials. Let's empower patients having them go online, sign up to PCrowd. And whenever they're going to their doctor, just send us an extra blood sample for research or whatever. You're going for a bone marrow biopsy. Just send us that extra sample. And by doing that, we have 1000, 2000, 3000 people. Now, we can ask the questions, now we can answer who is truly going to progress to myeloma because you have the power of numbers to see who is going to progress and who is not. And I think that's something so empowering for every patient to be part of that study. And we have many of them. She told me I just got my 17th blood draw. I'm a PCrowder. So it's a wonderful event. It's a wonderful feeling of a community coming together to prevent myeloma from happening because they are part of the study.

What are some of the initial findings from the PCrowd Study?

We have a number of key findings from PCrowd study, including observations that we can better stratify an individual's personalized risk of progressing to overt cancer than we previously have been able to. We're also learning a lot about how different cell components in the bone marrow talk to each other in ways that might inhibit progression to overt cancer or promote progression. And those are things that we can capitalize on when we're thinking about targets for treatment and prevention.