What is the PROMISE study?

The PROMISE study is asking for the first question. If I am at high risk of developing myeloma, if my brother or sister or my mom had myeloma, and I might be having a higher chance of developing MGUS or smoldering, why aren't we looking for it? And I know so many people come to me and say, I screen for breast cancer, I screen for colon cancer. We screen for cancer because cancer screening saves lives. Yet we don't do a simple blood test to look for a monoclonal protein. And I can tell you that it's much easier to get a blood sample than getting mammography or colonoscopy. So why aren't we doing it? And many people would say, well, if you diagnose MGUS, who cares? Those patients would never develop myeloma. But you can reverse it and say every single myeloma must have had an MGUS or smoldering. We know that. So if you're diagnosed at age 60 or 50 with a bone fracture and you have myeloma, wouldn't it have been nice when you were age 40, you went to your primary care doctor. He pulled a blood sample and he said, oh, you have a smoldering myeloma. You will likely develop myeloma in the future. Let's do something about it. Let's observe you carefully. Let's prevent it in the future. So the whole idea was, let's screen for the first time in the US, a high risk population to try and see how many of them would truly have MGUS and smoldering. And can we now look at those patients and see who would progress to myeloma? And can we understand the mechanism of progression in those patients? And we said let's screen African-Americans over the age of 40, as well as first degree relatives, any first degree relative, Caucasian, African-American, anything, as long as your age over over the age of 40. Since the recording of the video, the eligibility criteria for the promise study has been amended. Currently, the Promise study is enrolling two groups of U.S. adults age 30 or older qualify for a free screening: one African Americans and or two people of any race who have a parent, sibling or child with multiple myeloma, another blood cancer, or one of these related conditions: monoclonal gammopathy of undetermined significance, smoldering multiple myeloma, and Waldonstrom macroglobulinemia. The promise study is also enrolling individuals who are 18 years of age or older and have a strong family history of blood cancer. What we found is actually, as we're screening patients, the incidence of those patients having MGUS is much higher than what we consider. So we were thinking we will get maybe 6, 7% positive, screened positive from the cohort that we're screening. We're finding that we're getting into the 15%, 13, 15% are screened positive in our cohort. This is the Promise study is all online. So you can go to the promisestudy.org and wherever you live you can just answer three or four questions. We then enroll you in the study. You don't need a physician, you don't need a consent form with a physician or in any office, and you go to a quest, diagnostics or to any of your labs. We send a kit so it's all free and we get the test done and we will call you if you're positive and we will send you an email if you're negative, so that we can ask you to be rescreened again in three years. So it's simple. You can do it wherever you are. It's research level only, meaning it does not go in your chart. It does not change your insurance. When you're positive, we recommend that you go and see an oncologist and start the process of making sure that you follow carefully with someone so that you never develop myeloma in your lifetime.