The 2013 annual meeting of the American Society of Hematology (ASH) will take place December 7 through 10 in New Orleans.

Abstracts for the more than 500 myeloma-related presentations that will be given at the meeting can now be viewed and discussed at The Myeloma Beacon.  The list of abstracts begins on this page.

The ASH meeting is one of several large medical conferences where myeloma-related research findings are presented each year.  However, from a multiple myeloma perspective, the ASH meeting is generally the most important of the meetings.

Myeloma researchers therefore make it a point to have important study results ready in time for them to be presented at the ASH meeting.

As a result, there are hundreds of myeloma-related research presentations made at ASH each year, and the presentations feature some of the most important research findings in the field to be made public in any given year.

Readers of The Beacon can therefore ex­pec­t extensive coverage of ASH-related research during the next month or two, including updates from the meeting itself.

Last week, abstracts for the presentations that will be made at this year’s meeting were made available to the general public at the conference website.

The abstracts at the ASH website, however, are for studies related to the entire range of blood-related disorders -- not just multiple myeloma.

To make it easy for the Beacon’s readers to review just the myeloma-related meeting abstracts, The Beacon is making them available right here at the Beacon website.

The meeting abstracts at The Beacon, of which there are more than 500, con­tain most of the in­­for­ma­tion one would ex­pec­t, including the abstract title, authors, images, and tables.

Additional in­­for­ma­tion, such as the time and location of the abstract’s presentation at the meeting, will be added later this month.  During and after the December meeting, select abstracts also will be updated with links to the presentation slide decks and posters presented at the conference.

Comments can be left on any of the abstracts, and the Beacon's readers are encouraged to use the comment section to share their thoughts about the abstracts.  There is also a discussion thread in the Beacon's online multiple myeloma forum dedicated to reviews and comments about the abstracts.

To make it easy for readers to find abstracts about specific topics, the Beacon team has been reviewing and categorizing the abstracts since they became available.  The result of all this work is that most of the abstracts now have topic “tags” at the bottom of each page, and each of these tags can be clicked to display a com­plete list of the abstracts on the specific topic.

Some of the most popular topics covered by the classification tags include the fol­low­ing (click each of the links to see the relevant abstracts):

• New treatments under development, including abstracts with clinical trial results for new treatments, and abstracts with preclinical research about new treatments
• Myeloma therapies already being marketed, including Revlimid (lenalidomide), Velcade (bortezomib), Kyprolis (carfilzomib), Pomalyst (pomalidomide, Imnovid), thalidomide (Thalomid), cyclophosphamide (Cytoxan), melphalan (Alkeran), prednisone, doxorubicin (Adriamycin), Treanda (bendamustine), clarithromycin (Biaxin), and Doxil (doxorubicin liposomal)
• Classes of therapies (which include all abstracts for agents in the class), including immunomodulatory agents, proteasome inhibitors, HDAC inhibitors, and monoclonal antibodies
• Stem cell transplantation, including autologous (own) transplantation, allogeneic (donor) transplantation, and stem cell mobilization
• Maintenance therapy, consolidation therapy, bisphosphonates, and secondary cancer
• Smoldering myeloma, MGUS (monoclonal gammopathy of undetermined significance), plasma cell leukemia, amyloidosis, and extramedullary disease
• Chromosomal abnormalities, minimal residual disease, gene expression profiling, imaging, treatment biomarkers, bone disease, kidney failure, and survival.

Readers should bear in mind that classification of the abstracts, while very far along, is still ongoing.

Also, the ASH abstracts cur­rently do not appear in the list of results one gets when carrying out searches from the Beacon’s search box.  The ability to freely search the abstracts, however, will be available by next week.

The Beacon's initiative to make the ASH meeting's myeloma-related abstracts easily accessible to the myeloma community is a reflection of the Beacon's long-standing commitment to improving the care and treat­ment available to myeloma patients everywhere.

Easy access to the abstracts not only helps patients and caregivers educate themselves about their disease and treat­ment options.  It also helps physicians and other medical professionals who regularly read The Beacon to keep up to date on the latest research relevant to the care they provide myeloma patients.