Dr Robert Rifkin Describes Research on Triple-Class Refractory MM Patients

Researchers are aiming to overcome drug resistance in this population, said Robert Rifkin, MD, FACP, a medical oncologist and hematologist at Rocky Mountain Cancer Centers.

Transcript

What were the main findings of your study on real-world treatment patterns and burdens in patients with triple-class refractory multiple myeloma?

What we did was we used the tools that were well-validated within our registry, to look at health-related quality of outcomes. And we looked not only at generic measures, but we also looked at cancer-specific measures. We used the FACT-MM, which is a well-validated tool, the basic pain inventory, because remember, a lot of myeloma patients have bone pains and neuropathy. We used well-validated tools, and with the depth and breadth of the registry data, we could do median overall survival for triple-class refractory patients. We found that that was only 8.9 months, so that once you become triple-class refractory, you're sort of entering a territory with deep weeds.

I think it's important to identify those people, and come up with combination treatment or novel therapies that will help us really improve on that overall survival. I think the strength of our analysis was that we were able to find 240 patients that satisfied our rigorous definition of triple-class refractory. I think that's important. That's a relatively large collection. The nice thing is we had very good demographics on all of them that were in the registry, as well as very good completion reports on our quality of life case report things. So I think those are important. What we're really striving to do, if you think about the underpinnings of all of this, is we need to overcome drug resistance because that's what happens with the triple-class refractory patients. Hopefully, by mining our registry data, we'll get some inklings as to maybe what would be the next line of therapy, and importantly, where we can incorporate new things. As all of you know from [The American Society of Hematology meeting] we have lots of CAR-T presentations, bispecific antibody presentations, and a whole variety of other new things we can treat myeloma with. Hopefully by using this triple-class refractory population, we can explore those therapies and maybe advanced them further forward in our lines of therapy.