Multiple Myeloma: New Treatments Aid Patient Subgroups

How does elranatamab change the treatment of an incurable disease? Does it bring us closer to a cure or to making multiple myeloma a manageable chronic disease?

With the already approved elranatamab, the most important aspect is that it adds another treatment option for patients with myeloma. With the progression-free survival data I indicated, life expectancy is increased, with a good quality of life and acceptable safety.

Obviously, elranatamab is still under study and development, even in early lines, including in patients with newly diagnosed myeloma. When we are choosing first-line therapy, we select the best patients by combining traditional drugs with these new immunotherapies, such as elranatamab, it is likely that we are much closer to offering a cure to specific subgroups.

Although it won’t happen in all cases, I believe it will be applicable to a significant subgroup of patients, making chronicity of the disease a reality we are already approaching. Each day, we encounter more patients receiving different lines of treatment and ultimately meeting their life expectancy with myeloma. Even though some may die, it is often due to causes not related to myeloma. This is the most important contribution of these innovations, such as elranatamab.
 

Dr. Mateos reported receiving honoraria from Janssen, Celgene, Takeda, Amgen, GSK, AbbVie, Pfizer, Regeneron, Roche, Sanofi, Stemline, Oncopeptides, and Kite for delivering lectures and for participating in advisory boards. 

This story was translated from El Médico Interactivo, which is part of the Medscape professional network, using several editorial tools, including AI, as part of the process. Human editors reviewed this content before publication. A version of this article appeared on Medscape.com.