Hi, my name is Gurbaksh Kaur. I'm an assistant professor at UT Southwestern, also the co-director of the amyloid program. I'm very excited to be here in San Diego at ASH 23 and happy to share our research that we're presenting tomorrow. It's an oral abstract presented by Dr. Fika Hoff, who is our internal medicine resident at UT Southwestern. And our work is focusing mainly on real-world outcomes and prescribing patterns essentially of Velcade, which is a drug that's used in induction regimens when we treat newly diagnosed multiple myeloma patients. What we showed was historically there's been small studies that show that have compared once weekly versus twice weekly dosing in newly diagnosed multiple myeloma. Mostly historical clinical trials have used a twice weekly one for age 11, so essentially twice a week dosing schedule for induction. But twice weekly is often associated with a high risk of neuropathy, peripheral neuropathy. And I think what happens in real life is way different from what happens in clinical trials. In my practice and many of my colleagues, what we do is we give the participant on a weekly schedule. And we wanted to see, we used the Flatiron Health Database, which is a large, you know, real-world compilation of patients database since 2011, I believe. And we had about 2,500 patients. We chose a more modern cohort since we wanted to show that the results from this cohort are applicable to today. And we have about 2,500 patients in this cohort. And what we showed was that two-thirds of the patients, so about 67%, you were given a Bortizomib on a weekly basis, whereas one-third was given Bortizomib in a twice weekly schedule. And we realized that over the last, over time, from 2017 onwards till now, that there has been an increase in the utilization of the once weekly practice. So it was about 57% in 2017, and now it's about 75%. The greatest uptick happened around 2019, 2020. And that is likely because of the COVID pandemic when all of us were trying to minimize patient exposure and patient clinic visits. So, and that practice sort of stuck around. So now it's about 75%. We did realize that the twice weekly dosing was more common in patients who had light chain cast neuropathy in that setting. And additionally, what we found was that the peripheral neuropathy risk was much higher in the twice weekly, which was about, I believe, 30-something percent versus 18% with once weekly. Overall, though, in terms of how much, what was the patient response to treatment, once weekly and twice weekly, the PFS, right, the time in remission when you get this regimen, was essentially similar. And then the overall survival was not reached in both groups. So this sort of has given credibility to what we do in real life, that we believe that once weekly participants should be utilized as a standard of care, because it reduces patient visits to the doctor's office and quality of life is important. It also reduces the risk of peripheral neuropathy. And we have shown in this large cohort, which is about 2,500 patients, that it's equally efficacious. So thank you very much.
HealthTree • December 10, 2023