I'm Ola Langgren. I'm a professor of medicine. I'm chief of the division for myeloma at Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center at the University of Miami. Our program has been growing very, very fast. We are about three years old as a division for myeloma and we have already seven faculty. We are just about to sign the offer letter for our eighth faculty. We see about 8,000 patient visits every year for myeloma. We also have a very large clinical trials portfolio. We have over 20 trials open, mostly phase one or phase two trials. We have a few phase three trials because they give access to newer drugs for patients in indications where we currently don't have those drugs. We also have a large computational oncology program where we have about 10 people in the laboratory focusing on genomics and also studies around the immune system, how the microenvironment interacts with the tumor cells. We will continue to also expand in 2024 our wet lab and we are setting up a lot of new platforms with blood-based technologies for tracking for minimal residual disease. We will have protein-based, DNA-based, cell-based, various types of platforms. We will also partner with these with bone marrow based and we also have research studies that use immunopet-based MOD testing. Our mission is to keep on building and making sure that we become one of the top three myeloma centers in the United States within five years from our inception. We started three years ago, so we have two more years to go, but we are right on track for that. I think in about two years from now the size of our program will be about the same size as the program was at Sloan Kettering when I left here three years ago. We're very excited and we welcome patients who come. We can always help and we have a lot of new innovative treatment strategies for patients. We do a lot of different biological studies in our laboratory, both in our computational oncology lab as well as our wet lab. One of the projects that we are working on in relation with the Health Tree Foundation focuses on studies of bone marrow biopsies from patients with a new diagnosis of multiple myeloma. We use advanced computational modeling and we take new approaches trying to see if we can correlate the outcomes of patients with those findings that we see in the biopsies. So we have patients coming for biopsies for standard of care that are enrolled in the Health Tree database and if patients want to participate in the collaboration with us, we can get access to those slides from the biopsies that already have been done. We will use that to train our computational systems to see if with the technologies that we have we can much better predict the outcome. And ultimately what I would like to make sure we do is to deliver precision medicine so we can tell patients that this would be the optimal THAP going forward for an individual patient. So that's the mission of that collaboration with Health Tree.
HealthTree • January 10, 2024