Hello, I'm Rafael Fonseca from the Mayo Clinic in Arizona, and I am here today at the International Myeloma Workshop. We're obviously looking forward to all the abstracts, but I'd like to share with you some of the work we're doing in the area that is now called metabolomics. And what it is, is just a study of normal processes and metabolic processes in the cells where different proteins or other substrates participate in normal cell biology, but how do we use that also to attack those myeloma cells? One of the things that is very obvious is that myeloma cells produce a lot of proteins. That's what leads to the M protein and of course the free-lack gene and all those things. So as they become really good at producing proteins, they have certain vulnerabilities that come because of that. When you're folding proteins, you're creating them, packing them, you want to secrete them. One of the byproducts of that is hydrogen peroxide. And that is because the folding process, there's a formation of this bridge, a disulfide bond, it's called. But the important part is that peroxide, as you can imagine, is very toxic to cells, like peroxide that is used for, you know, in the hair salons and the like. So we have learned that if we focus on tripping the processes that, you know, try to get rid of that peroxide, we can actually make that work to our advantage. That kills myeloma cells. And in fact, some drugs like the Revlimid can work by doing that. So we have a whole comprehensive program that studies proteins, studies this metabolism to learn how we can use other drugs and other approaches that will build on that knowledge. So I would love to share more of that with you at another time. But as we continue to understand the mechanism of actions of these drugs, we want to use that knowledge to perfect it, but also to think about what other drugs we should add to enhance our ability to kill myeloma cells. So thank you very much for your attention.
HealthTree • August 26, 2022