Living Longer With Myeloma: Real-World Clinic Results | James Berenson, MD

I'm Jim Berenson. I'm president of the Berenson Cancer Center, and I'm also the founder and CEO of the Institute for Myeloma and Bone Cancer Research in West Hollywood, California.

It's my pleasure today to tell you about a recent paper we published in Haematologica, in which we looked at the outcomes among all the patients who we've seen in our clinic who initiated therapy there—that is, their first treatment was at our center. This included 175 unselected patients. We wanted to determine their overall survival and also look at their progression-free survival.

What we learned is that without the use of transplant in any of these patients in frontline therapy, and just one in second line, or with CAR-Ts or bispecific antibodies, our median survival is now at 13 years. Progression-free survival was about 20 to 30 months, and interestingly, that did not really predict overall survival.

In addition, the depth of response, the genetics, and some of the factors routinely used to predict outcomes in our clinic did not really predict survival. I think the reason is that we’re very hands-on, very quick to respond, and we have a plethora of different possible treatments for our patients.

This represents the longest survival reported by any clinic in the world for unselected patients. We're very proud of these outcomes, and they are only expected to improve over the next few years.

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