ASH 2025 | Building a framework for advanced multiple myeloma care in Kenya: outcomes of the 2024 workshop

So I’m very excited to be collaborating with a big myeloma collaborative program in Kenya. The program called AMPATH started out about three decades ago in Kenya to help and educate and treat patients with HIV. Since then, it has expanded to a multi-nation partnership that expands beyond infection, but also to include cancer. So my work at Indiana University set up a collaboration with the AMPATH program that is based out of Moi University Teaching Hospital in Eldoret, Kenya. It is very clear that in the remaining parts of the world outside of the developed area, access to care continues to be difficult. In the Kenya national database that the Moi University program have collected, a good number of patients actually show up already with advanced states, with paraplegia, and many died even before they get started on treatment after they’re diagnosed. So the first part of the program that I’m a part of was actually about increasing awareness and collaboration between treating physicians outside with the doctors who are the specialists at Moi Teaching University. So this program has already been ongoing. But to boost it up another step, we had educational grant funding to host a workshop that is not people coming in just to get lectured, but rather an interactive program where they’re using their own resources to decide how to best use technology to diagnose patients and also how to use that information to advance clinical trials and also access to novel therapy. So the workshop brought 100 and some physicians and nurses and pharmacists from 23 different counties on the western coast of Kenya. So if you split Kenya in half, country-wise, this is on the west side, and they all come from a pretty big region to be at the workshop. So the workshop went over diagnosis, did the pre and post education session, and also created a template for order sets to help with sites that haven’t started on therapy to be able to implement it more easily. And the key part also is that the workshop actually included regulatory representatives. So if I think about how to make drugs accessible, it’s not just the doctor wanting it and the patient wanting it. There’s so many other elements. So we had also representatives from the NCI of Kenya, as well as folks from the National Guideline Development, folks from National Procurement of Drugs, and also the National Insurance Agency to come and have a dialogue about if all of us were working for the same cause, how do we collaborate better? So we’re hoping that this platform that we have created is now the first critical conversation that we will build on in the future.

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