EHA 2019 | Irene Ghobrial: EHA 2019 highlights
Irene Ghobrial, MD, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Boston, MA, gives her highlights in multiple myeloma from EHA 2019. Dr Ghobrial also discusses what she is looking forward to at ASH 2019. This interview took place at the 24th Congress of the European Hematology Association (EHA) 2019, held in Amsterdam, Netherlands.
Transcript (edited for clarity)
I think EHA is always very exciting to see all of the updates in multiple myeloma, and it’s very interesting how much myeloma therapy changes. In the old days, we used to say three drug regimens up front is important and cool. Now, we’re seeing all the data with four drug regimens...
I think EHA is always very exciting to see all of the updates in multiple myeloma, and it’s very interesting how much myeloma therapy changes. In the old days, we used to say three drug regimens up front is important and cool. Now, we’re seeing all the data with four drug regimens. Again, I think that this will be taken over to become the standard of care in the future for our patients, and hopefully that will give us longer remission, MRD negative diseases much more, and potentially cure. The other thing that’s very essential and important is can we stop therapy if we’re MRD negative for a while? Again this is still being investigated, but I think the future for myeloma to say we will have a good induction therapy, we will personalize therapy and not use all the drugs at the same time, and potentially stop therapy so that we’re not doing maintenance forever will be really nice and important.
It’s hard to know. I think we want to see potentially some of the upfront studies are for drug regiments. I don’t know if they’ll be ready for ASH or not, but it would be wonderful to see. I’d love to see more on understanding the microenvironment, of course. I’d like to see more on smoldering myeloma, but again, that’s my bias of interest.
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