Results of a recent Spanish study suggest that elderly multiple myeloma patients who receive Velcade plus thalidomide or Velcade plus pred­nisone as maintenance therapy achieve deeper responses following initial therapy with Velcade-based treatment regimens.

In addition, elderly myeloma patients who receive Velcade plus thalido­mide as maintenance therapy may achieve better treatment outcomes and longer survival rates than patients who receive Velcade plus pred­nisone as maintenance therapy.

“In our trial, VT [Velcade plus thalidomide] was slightly superior to VP [Velcade plus …

A well-known psychologist and philosopher, James Hillman, wrote:

“The great task of a life-sustaining culture is to keep the invisibles attached… And then we must look back over our lives at some of the accidents and curiosities and oddities and troubles and sicknesses and begin to see more in those things than we saw before…There is still a thread of individual character that determines how you live through those things. This is destiny. Symptoms are part of our calling — …

A type of test called the free light chain assay can frequently detect oligo­secretory disease in multiple myeloma patients. The findings, discussed in a letter to the editor of The New England Journal of Medicine, also indicate that oligosecretory myeloma is more prevalent at later stages of the disease.

Oligosecretory myeloma, along with nonsecretory myeloma, is a subset of multiple myeloma. Nonsecretory myeloma patients have no measure­able levels of monoclonal (M) protein in their urine or blood. Similarly, oligosecretory myeloma …

Pssst…wanna buy some stem cells?

It seems there’s nothing to stop you now, you know.

It used to be that compensating individuals for donating peripheral blood stem cells (PBSCs) was a crime, a felony actually.  Up to five years in a federal prison.  For anyone involved in a PBSC donation for which compensation or some type of payment had been made.  This included the recipient of the “illegally” gotten stem cells.

There’s been a battle raging for many years over …

The National Comprehensive Cancer Network (NCCN) has updated its guide­lines for the treat­ment of multiple myeloma, and the new guidelines will be interpreted by many as a vote of confidence for Revlimid main­te­nance ther­apy.

The NCCN guidelines are followed closely by physicians and by many U.S. health insurance com­pa­nies, which frequently use them when making reim­burse­ment decisions about different cancer treat­ments.

The guidelines are comprised of recommendations based on the results of recent clinical trials and ongoing scientific research.  A …

Results of a recent, small German study show that donor stem cell trans­plan­tation followed by Revlimid maintenance therapy may be feasible in heavily pretreated relapsed or refractory multiple myeloma patients.

“For younger and fit patients, [donor] stem cell transplantation followed by maintenance therapy with [Revlimid] is a reasonable treatment option for patients who have already relapsed [after an autologous stem cell transplant],” said Dr. Nicolaus Kröger of the University Hospital Hamburg-Eppendorf in Germany and lead investigator of the study.

Dr. …

Physicians in the United States are able to prescribe Kyprolis for their patients now that the drug has been approved for the treat­ment of multiple myeloma.

The drug's widespread availability, however, raises the important question: For what types of myeloma patients are physicians likely to prescribe Kyprolis?

Last month, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved Kyprolis (car­filz­o­mib) for the treat­ment of multiple myeloma patients meeting specific criteria. The patients must have received at least two prior ther­a­pies, …