Is there a test that measures how quickly your myeloma cells divide?

[Music] is there a test that measures how quickly your myeloma cells divide at mayo clinic we're one of the few places that actually measures how rapidly myeloma cells divide um and we do that um using um flow cytometry which is somewhat complicated but we we stain the nuclei of the myeloma cells and we count how many of them uh have twice as much dna uh as the normal cell meaning that they're in the process of dividing and we can do this with hundreds of thousands of cells and we can calculate how many of the myeloma cells are dividing and that is useful because it turns out to be a very powerful prognostic factor and we we don't really have any other ways of measuring how rapidly the myeloma cells are dividing but it turns out that you know most of the time less than two percent of the myeloma cells are dividing but if it turns out that more than two percent are that's actually a very poor prognostic feature and that's different from a lot of other tumors where you know a larger number of cells are typically dividing the mayo clinic calls that test pc pro and it can be it can be ordered from the mayo medical labs under the name pc pro and it's also called cell cycle by flow cytometry how common is this test there's a test called the proliferation index almost nobody in the world ever does that test it's something that was done for a while in the mayo clinic but it's not particularly useful clinically [Music]