Treatment of Multiple Myeloma Guideline

An interview with Dr. Joe Mikhael from the City of Hope Cancer Center and International Myeloma Foundation on the ASCO and CCO joint clinical practice guideline. The guideline makes recommendations for patients who are transplantation eligible and ineligible with relapsed or refractory disease.

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Hello, and welcome to the ASCO Guidelines Podcast series. My name is Shannon McKernin, and I'm interviewing Dr. Joe Mikhael from the City of Hope Cancer Center and International Myeloma Foundation, lead author on "Treatment of Multiple Myeloma: ASCO and CCO Joint Clinical Practice Guideline." Thank you for being here today, Dr. Mikhael.
It's a pleasure to be with you.
So first, can you give us some context as to why this guideline was developed?
Well, we had a lot of ideas when we put together this guideline, but most importantly, multiple myeloma continues to be a rare disease in the cancer world. It really only accounts for about 1% to 2% of cancers. So for the practicing oncologist, they spend perhaps 3-ish percent of their time doing multiple myeloma.
And when you add to that there has been really a revolution in myeloma with new drugs approved, new treatments, new approaches, it really leaves the general oncologist with a complexity of how to treat this disease. And so we wanted to create a very practical guideline that would give very precise advice to walk through how one would care for a multiple myeloma patient, right from their diagnosis to indeed relapse disease.
We felt this approach was so important now, more than ever, because of the fact that myeloma has really changed so much, and now, thankfully, we're seeing our patients live so much longer that the treatment options can become a little bit more complicated over time. Furthermore, we partnered with Cancer Care Ontario, because this was really felt to be not just an American phenomenon, but really a full North American phenomenon of how we could work together to really give practical advice as to how to treat this disease.
So what are the key recommendations of this guideline?
In this guideline, we focused really on the treatment of the disease itself. There have been other guidelines that have focused on supportive care and bone disease and multiple myeloma, but we really focused on the treatment of patients really from induction therapy through to relapse.
So we spend time helping guide the decision around whether or not a patient is transplant eligible or ineligible, because that's really the first dividing marker in myeloma, because we know that transplant still has a role in myeloma, and eligible patients should have a transplant, or at least have access to a transplant. And historically, this was really done on the basis of age.
But the guidelines helps the clinician see that it's really not just an age phenomena. It's really a decision based on comorbidities and really what's best for the patient. So we spend time helping making that decision, and then provide very practical advice as to how to treat a patient who's going to transplant versus a patient who's not going to transplant.
We also, then, after the transplant, or in lieu of a transplant, we discuss the importance of continuous therapy, or sometimes called, maintenance therapy in myeloma. Again, we've seen maintenance therapy, now, have an impact on both progression free and overall survival. And so we felt it was really important to be very practical in giving advice as to what maintenance therapy agents to use and how to use them.
And then lastly, the guideline provides a lot of practical advice as to a patient who has relapsed with multiple myeloma. We have so many choices now with three major classes of drugs of proteasome inhibitors, immuno-modulatory drugs, and now newer monoclonal antibodies, it can be difficult sometimes to know which combination to use.
We know that triplet combinations tend to be preferred. So we walk through a number of those triplets and provide advice as how to explicitly use them. We do emphasize the importance of supportive care and of risk factor analysis throughout the guideline, so that we can understand the difference between high risk and low risk myeloma, so that we can understand how important a patient's comorbidities, especially in a disease that primarily affects older patients, can be managed.
And so we try to do so in a comprehensive way, but one that really distills down to the critical pieces to allow the practicing clinician some real advice.
So why is this guideline so important, and how will it change practice?
There are several kinds of guidelines for multiple myeloma, but I really think this is a critical guideline because it is so clinical and practical in its essence. It's really designed to not just give the utopian view or the clinical trial view of a disease, but practically in the trenches, how do we use the drugs that we know are going to benefit our patients.
Myeloma is one of the few cancers where we have seen a doubling, if not a tripling of survival in the last decade, because of so many of these new agents. And so making sure that our patients are treated optimally really is important. And we want to be able to ensure that they receive the best therapy possible, so they can live a longer life, but also live it with a greater quality of life.
And so finally, how will these guideline recommendations affect patients?
Well, we really hope that this is going to help patients all across North America and the whole world, because it will give very concrete advice to the practicing clinician in how to approach the disease. And one of the things I think will directly impact patients, if you will, right away is one of the themes of these guidelines, which is that you don't treat a patient simply based on the biopsy or simply based on their age, but that it is really a complex network of comorbidities, risk factors from the disease itself, the potential side effects of certain drugs, and a patient's own very personal history.
It really fits in with the ASCO modality that we have of ensuring that we bring personalized medicine to our patients. And so this will allow the person who's reading it and who's applying it to their patient to recognize the importance of general guidelines, but also of applying it to the specific patient they care for. Because as I like to say, we don't treat multiple myeloma, we treat people. And so hopefully, this will allow the clinician to have that precision to care for their patient in the best way possible.
Great. Thank you for that overview of this guideline, and thank you for your time today Dr. Mikhael.
It's been a real pleasure. Thank you very much.
And thank you to all of our listeners for tuning into the ASCO Guidelines Podcast series. To read the full guideline, go to www.asco.org/hematologic-malignancies-guidelines. And if you've enjoyed what you've heard today, please rate and review the podcast, and refer the show to a colleague.