ASCO 2026 | Survival outcomes of black patients with newly diagnosed myeloma in an era of novel therapies

So from the prior literature, we know that black patients have a higher incidence of multiple myeloma and unfortunately also a higher mortality when it comes to overall survival. They present at diagnosis with worse and organ damage and this is a significant problem. And there has been a single study out of the Veterans Affairs where they showed that when patients have equal access to multiple myeloma therapies, any therapy, the overall survival in black patients is actually equal or even superior in younger patients compared to their white counterparts. But it’s unknown whether this holds true in other settings and also in the era of novel therapies such as triplets and quadruplets. That’s why we did this study. And what we found, we did it in two stages. First, across patients of Cleveland Clinic patients in Ohio and Florida, we looked at whether there’s disparities in terms of access to triplets and quadruplets within the first year of diagnosis. And we found that even after adjusting for clinical and sociodemographic variables, the access to those therapies was virtually equal. And then on a second step, we looked at, okay, when you have equal access to therapies, is there still the disparity in overall survival that we know exists otherwise in the real world from prior literature? And what we found was the five-year all-cause mortality was similar across those two cohorts, which is very encouraging because this sort of validates what we’ve seen in the VA study, but that was predominantly a male cohort. And this is, you know, both males and females and outside of VA and in the era of new therapies. So this is our primary result.

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