Jeffrey Wolf, MD, on Findings From a Study Investigating Therapy Changes Using MRD in Patients With Multiple Myeloma

Jeffrey Wolf, MD, of the University of California San Francisco, discussed with CancerNetwork® the results from his presentation “Making Clinical Decisions to Change Therapy Using Measurable Residual Disease Improves the Outcome in Multiple Myeloma” at the 2020 American Society of Hematology (ASH) Annual Meeting & Exposition.

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What we did in this study is we looked at 373 patients, both in San Francisco and in Spain. In 58 cases, we found that we had to change our therapy because of what we discovered. In some cases, it was because the patient had 0 malignant cells that we could measure for MRD; and in 3 cases, we decided not to even take them to a bone marrow transplant, which is sort of standard, because we felt we had gotten a deep enough response. In other cases, we found 0 malignant cells out of a million and decided that we could stop the maintenance therapy they were on. In still others, we found that by measuring [the MRD] sequentially, we could say that the therapy they were on wasn’t effective and either stop it or stop it and initiate some other therapy that could result in a better, lower MRD.