My name is Hamza Hashmi. I'm a myeloma focused physician at the Medical University of South Carolina. In my practice, I see patients with myeloma with immunodosis. I treat patients with newly diagnosed myeloma, relapsed myeloma. I do transplant, chiropractic trials. My career has been, focus has been myeloma for the most part. At ASH 2023 meeting, we have many abstracts presented as posters and oral presentation. And one of the highlights, I think, is an oral presentation looking at the role of immunotherapy to clistimab for patients with relapsed refractory multiple myeloma. And this is a multi-center consortium effort where we had a total of 106 patients who received immunotherapy to clistimab in the real world. 80% of the patients who were given this immunotherapy would have been ineligible for the clinical trial that actually got this immunotherapy approved for patients in the US. We in our study show that clistimab was not only a safe but also an effective immunotherapy options for patients with myeloma. We did not see any significant high incidence of toxicities or side effects from this immunotherapy. And we found that these patients had a fairly good response to this immunotherapy in the late line with myeloma and were able to reap the benefits of this immunotherapy. I think this study shows us that patients who otherwise would have been ineligible or unfit to receive these novel treatments in clinical trials can still receive them in real world. And their frailty and their, it should not be a barrier towards getting this effective therapy.
HealthTree • December 19, 2023