Hello, my name is Trissia Klage. I'm a first year fellow in hematology and oncology at Wild Cornell doing a lot of research in myeloma. I had a presentation today here at ASH looking at evolving biomarkers for patients with smoldering myeloma. As you all know, smoldering myeloma is a very mixed group of patients where some people progress to active myeloma within a few years and others can be watched for many years without treatment. And there are many different risk scores to try to categorize patients' diseases in different groups. And most of these risk scores are based on the disease when you're first diagnosed. However, with multiple myeloma, we have this advantage where we can measure the disease really easily with just a blood test. So we wanted to use this opportunity to see how we can look at how the disease evolves and how that impacts the risk of progression to active myeloma. So what we found was that if you have an increase in your M protein of more than 0.4 within the first year of diagnosis or an increase in the relation ratio of 40% or more during the first year of diagnosis, this is a marker of high risk of progression. And we looked at these markers also incorporating with the regular risk scores that we use, most often the 220-20 score. And we found that adding these evolving markers with the increase in the monoclonal protein and increase in the free-lytion ratio, adding those to the Mayo 220-20 score, which is based on a free-lytion ratio of about 20, a bone marrow plasma cell percentage about 20 and M protein above 2, these evolving markers could further among the patients who have the same Mayo risk discern patients who are at higher risk of progression. So in addition to you just using the baseline markers that you may have when you present, adding these evolving markers and how the free-lytion ratio and M protein changed during the first year can help us to restratify the disease.
HealthTree • December 21, 2023