Well, my name is Rafat Abunur. I'm the director of the Myeloma Program at Indiana University School of Medicine. And it's really exciting to be at ASH 2022, seeing a lot of my colleagues in person for the long time to talk to them and exchange ideas and hear about some of the amazing research going on. So I'm excited about ASH. Why am I excited about ASH? A lot of stuff going on in Myeloma today. And we are doing clinical trials with drugs that are so novel, you know, the bispecific T-cell engager. They're working amazingly well. There are a lot of them. You know, it's going to take me two days to learn how to pronounce the name of all of these different drugs. But I'm excited about the results. You know, we're seeing patients who have failed many lines of therapy with horrible relapse, and they're responding really well. And it's just a steroid-free regimen. And, you know, the side effects are manageable. Obviously, we have to pay attention to infection complications and things like that. But things are going really well for these drugs. And they all have different side effect profile. And so we just need to learn more about it and how to use them, when to use them, how early we can use them. So I'm excited about that. I'm excited that there's a trial from France showing that you don't have to use a lot of steroids after the first two months, you know. And that's really what the patient are looking for. I mean, they want a treatment that is steroid-free because the fatigue, you know, all the side effects from steroids they deal with. So I'm glad that we are learning through randomized trial that you don't need steroids for the rest of your life. First two months, and then move on. So that's what I'm excited about.
HealthTree • December 12, 2022