A pleasant weekend to you, myeloma world.

Today is a quiet day in terms of new myeloma-related research and news. We've got just two items in our daily list of new myeloma research, which you can always find at the end of every Myeloma Morning. The article's in today's list are specialized enough that we won't be summarizing them in this report.

We do want to mention, however, that the 2016 annual meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) is taking place this weekend and early next week in New Orleans.

Now, many of you are probably asking: AACR? What's that?

The AACR meeting isn't one that you hear discussed very frequently among multiple myeloma patients and caregivers. That's because it is a meeting focused on the biology of all different types of cancer – including multiple myeloma – and also on early-stage research into possible new cancer therapies.

So there are not, for example, many presentations at the AACR meeting describing results of clinical trials. You also won't find many presentations analyzing data from large databases of patient records.

Those sorts of studies are the ones you find more frequently at the well known “ASH”, “EHA”, and “ASCO” annual meetings (American Society of Hematology, European Hematology Association, and American Society of Clinical Oncology, respectively).

Still, the AACR meeting is a big meeting, with more than 16,000 attendees, and there is a lot of cutting-edge myeloma-related research presented at the conference. Our quick scan of the presentation abstracts for this year's AACR meeting indicates there are about 75 myeloma-related studies.

Most of those studies are about disease biology and laboratory research related to potential new drugs. So we'll be speaking with some experts to get their sense on which of the studies are particularly noteworthy, after which we'll report back to you.

There are, however, a few abstracts that we thought we would discuss in today's Myeloma Morning. We give each of them their own section below.

(And, for all you do-it-yourselfers out there, here is the home page for the abstracts.)

Multiple Myeloma Is Becoming More Common (But Mainly For Good Reasons)

The first AACR abstract we'll look at today is by a group of researchers primarily affiliated with the U.S. National Cancer Institute. They report that the number of people in the United States who have multiple myeloma patients is likely to climb sharply during the next five years (“Multiple myeloma will become a common cancer in the era of modern therapy,” abstract #5231).

At first, this sounds like bad news. But it's actually good news, because increasing survival of people with multiple myeloma is the key reason the number of people with multiple myeloma is likely to increase.

It is true that the number of new cases of multiple myeloma is increasing from year to year. This is mainly due, however, to the aging of the population and, some argue, better techniques to detect the disease.

The authors of the AACR study estimate that the number of people living with multiple myeloma in the United States will increase from about 75,000 in 2010 to almost 120,000 by 2021. Improvements in survival will propel this change, the authors of the AACR study predict.

“Driven by access to modern therapies with unprecedented efficacy,” the researchers write, “overall survival for patients with multiple myeloma will continue to improve significantly. Consequently, our forecast is multiple myeloma will become much more common in the era of modern therapy.”

Testing For Multiple Myeloma Cells In The Blood

The second study we'll review today is by researchers primarily associated with Johnson & Johnson. They investigate a technology for counting the number of multiple myeloma cells found in a 4 milliliter sample of a person's blood. The test also assesses whether the myeloma cells have the t(4;14), t(14;16), and del(17p) chromosomal abnormalities (“Peripheral blood circulating multiple myeloma cells (CMMCs ) correlate with disease burden and can be used to characterize high-risk cytogenetics in newly diagnosed and smoldering myeloma,” abstract #3163).

The researchers used this test with blood samples from several different groups of smoldering and symptomatic multiple myeloma patients. They found that, in samples taken from symptomatic multiple myeloma patients undergoing treatment for their disease, the number of multiple myeloma cells counted by the test decreased as treatment progressed. In addition, the lower the number of counted cells at the end of treatment, the longer a patient's progression-free and overall survival. (This survival-related finding is a reflection, of course, of the common finding that patients who respond better to a given treatment generally have longer survival outcomes.)

In patients with smoldering multiple myeloma, those whose test results showed a higher number of multiple myeloma cells in their blood were more likely to progress to symptomatic multiple myeloma (that is, multiple myeloma requiring treatment).

MGUS Survival

Next, we turn to an AACR study that investigates overall survival in a group of people with monoclonal gammopathy of undetermined significance (MGUS). The study is by researchers at the John Theurer Cancer Center in Hackensack, New Jersey (“Survival prognosis of MGUS patients by clinical and risk subgroup: a result from a nationally representative prospective cohort,” abstract #2639).

The researchers make use of data for people with MGUS who took part in a large national health survey conducted in the United States in the late 1990s and early 2000s. There were over 22,500 participants in the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES). Among all those who participated, 483 people had MGUS.

The survey participants who had MGUS also had lab results – such as free light chain levels and M-spike – collected as part of the survey. These data allowed the researchers to determine what type of MGUS the survey participants had – IgM MGUS, non-IgM MGUS, or light chain MGUS.

In addition, the researchers were able to determine the MGUS patient's risk-of-progression category, using three criteria described by Mayo Clinic researchers in an oft-cited 2005 study (full text).

After a median follow-up of almost 10 years, overall survival among the MGUS patients in the NHANES survey was 117 months for the IgM MGUS patients, 173 months for non-IgM MGUS patients, and 109 months for light chain MGUS patients.

Median overall survival based on whether a patient had 0, 1, 2, or 3 of the risk factors described in the 2005 Mayo Clinic study was 185 months, 163 months, 137 months, and 76.5 months, respectively.

Dopamine And Multiple Myeloma

We close today's report with mention of a study that we expect to appeal to several different segments of our readership. The study is by researchers at The Ohio State University, and it involves laboratory research investigating whether dopamine has any activity against multiple myeloma.

Yes, you heard that right. Dopamine. That's the chemical Slate magazine has described as “the one neurotransmitter that everyone seems to know about.” Among its many roles, dopamine plays a part in the “high” some people get from intense exercise, and it's also behind the actual “high” associated with most addictive substances.

So you can just imagine who among our readers will be celebrating the fact that the Ohio State laboratory tests suggest dopamine could have a negative effect on multiple myeloma cells.

Dopamine, the authors write, “may be a new and an effective approach to retard the progression of multiple myeloma.” The authors also note that there are drugs which, for many years, have been approved to treat other diseases, and which affect dopamine in the body. These drugs, the researchers add, could possibly be used for the treatment of multiple myeloma.

The title of the authors's study is “Dopamine inhibits growth of multiple myeloma,” and it is abstract 3278 at the meeting.

New Myeloma-Related Research Articles

1. Borgman, C. J., “Concomitant multiple myeloma spectrum diagnosis in a central retinal vein occlusion: a case report and review” in Clinical and Experimental Optometry, April 15, 2016 (abstract)
2. Husney, J. et al., “Endoscopic ultrasound-fine needle aspiration: A novel way to diagnose a solitary extramedullary plasmacytoma of the liver” in Endoscopic Ultrasound, April 15, 2016 (abstract)