Advancing Care, Addressing Ongoing Challenges at the EHA 2025 Congress: Ola Landgren, MD, PhD

Ahead of this year's European Hematology Association (EHA) Congress in Milan, Ola Landgren, MD, PhD, chief of the myeloma division and leader of the experimental therapeutics program at Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center, and professor of medicine at the University of Miami, shares what he is most looking forward to at the meeting.

With this year marking the 30th anniversary of the EHA Congress, he also reflects on the most significant advancements in hematology over the past 3 decades, while highlighting key areas that still require further progress.

On Sunday, June 15, Landgren will be presenting his abstract, “A Randomized, Multi-Center Study of Carfilzomib, Lenalidomide, and Dexamethasone (KRD) With or Without Daratumumab (D) For the Treatment of Patients With Newly Diagnosed Multiple Myeloma (NDMM): The ADVANCE Clinical Trial,” during the session, "Treatment of Newly Diagnosed Multiple Myeloma (NDMM)."

This transcript was lightly edited; captions were auto-generated.

Transcript

What are you most looking forward to at the EHA 2025 Congress? Are there any sessions or presentations you're particularly excited about?

Being an expert in the field of multiple myeloma, I look forward to hearing what the other groups are doing in both newly diagnosed and relapsed disease from multiple myeloma.

I am particularly interested in how the field is evolving, reaching very high rates of minimal residual disease negativity, how the field is integrating all the new immunotherapies, chemotherapy-free regimens in the frontline setting and also in the relapse setting, [and] how MOD [mitozantrone, vincristine, and dexamethasone] can be used as a tool to help and guide on the treatment.

There are a lot of trials that are looking to delay old school chemotherapy, like transplants and other chemotherapies, and how MOD can really help and improve patient outcomes and quality of life. I think there are a lot of changes to come, and I'm really very excited about the meeting.

With this year marking the 30th anniversary of the EHA Congress, what major advancements in hematology over the past 3 decades stand out to you? Conversely, where do you see the greatest need for progress?

If I think about how the field has evolved over the past several years, EHA is celebrating its 30th anniversary, I have been a physician, this is my 31st year, so it's sort of aligned with EHA, there's been so many changes in the whole field of hematologic oncology.

When I was in fellowship, I remember, we were advised, there are a couple of diseases you should really stay away from. One of them was chronic lymphocytic leukemia, and the other one was multiple myeloma. The reasons being that there had been really no advances in those disease areas. I was thinking, "That sounds like such a great opportunity," so I chose to go in the direction of multiple myeloma.

I'm really very happy to have chosen that track because I've been able to collaborate and work with great people around the world for so many years. Together, I think we have really changed the face of the disease. The overall survival when I was in fellowship for multiple myeloma was only 1 to rarely over 3 years. These days, we have patients living 10 or 20 plus years.

I think given that multiple myeloma has an average age of onset around 70 years, with all the new therapies we have today, many patients are diagnosed, say, at the age [of] 70 or around that, probably could have the same lifespan as a person from the general population without the disease. That's remarkable to see.

We still are facing a lot of challenges, and also, importantly, we do not yet have an established cure for the disease. I think priorities going forward [are] to really develop a curative treatment for the disease. Other big unmet areas are patients with a more aggressive disease biology, [which] we refer to as high risk disease, to help those patients. They probably have a different subset of disease, or subsets of disease, to figure out how the biology works and to develop more rational therapies for those patients.

I think that there are a lot of other topics that relate to the use of chemotherapy-free regimens, using MOD-guided treatment strategies to improve not only survival, but also quality of life for patients. There are a lot of questions still on the table, but we have come a very long step forward.