Malignancies after Tandem ASCT for those on Total Therapy Protocols | Samer Al’Hadidi, MD | IMS 2023

Hi, I'm Samer Al-Hadidi. I'm an assistant professor at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences. It's our pleasure to present our abstracts we discussed in this meeting about secondary malignancies for patients who were treated on early adult therapy protocols at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences. We follow those patients for anytime between 15 to 25 years and we noticed that we have really improved outcomes for patients with myeloma overall and we're seeing patients living for longer which we're all excited about. We wanted to look into the effect of specifically transplantation into the secondary malignancies that is a concern to many of the physicians and also to the patients. So on more than 1300 patients who got transplanted to the University of Arkansas with more than 2500 transplants done and for the first three total therapy protocols we noticed relatively low incidence of hematological malignancies of less than 5% with 16 years of median follow-up. So that was reassuring to see that the incidence is relatively low and we also noticed that the secondary solid malignancies that occurred after the diagnosis of multiple myeloma was also relatively low at around 7.5% and those cancers included many cancers that are common in the United States including colon cancer, breast cancer, and also lung cancer. Unfortunately patients who develop any sort of cancer as we know from before don't do as well so it's better not to have that cancer compared to having a cancer but it's really interesting to see that patients who are living longer also are encountering more of those cancers for the fact that they're living longer. So we noticed for example that patients who got the transplant lived longer than the patients who did not regardless of the number of transplant one or tandem transplant and that may explain some of the malignancies being higher that patient population. Our hope is to share this with patients to be reassured that the risk of a secondary malignancies is relatively low which is really nice to see compared to the really good results that patients may encounter with transplants.