IMS 2025 | Elevated CTCs in NDMM correlate with a highly proliferative and genomically complex disease profile

I’m here at IMS and I’m presenting a poster on behalf of my colleagues regarding circulating tumor cells in multiple myeloma. We also know that circulating tumor cells in multiple myeloma at all these stages have a very interesting prognostic factor. So our idea in this work, in this poster, is to demonstrate that those patients with high CTC levels in the peripheral blood have specific transcriptomic or genomic features. For doing that, we relied on two datasets, one from the Czech Republic and the CoMMpass dataset. And working with a total of almost 700 patients, we first identified that the median of CTCs assessed by Menarini’s system or flow cytometry revealed prognostic values or something very interesting. At the same time, we detected that a high number of CTCs are correlated with worse cytogenetic aberrations as deletion of 13q, gain or amplification of 1q, translocation 4,14, those involving the MAF gene. But more importantly, we detected that we did a linear model correlating CTC numbers with gene expression and identified that a bunch of these genes were associated with cell proliferation and cell cycle. So with this idea in mind, we correlated our CTC numbers with the proliferation indexes already published that have been shown to have an interesting prognostic factor. And we discovered that CTCs, in addition to correlating with this prognostic factor, help us to identify a third group of patients with high CTCs and low proliferation indexes, also with a very bad prognostic value, which is indicating that CTCs not only surpass these proliferation indexes, but also they are surpassing the genomic and transcriptomic features. So, in summary, CTCs have an interesting prognostic factor by two different techniques in different datasets. These CTC numbers correlate with adverse prognostic genomic and transcriptomic features and importantly they are correlated with cell cycle and proliferation.

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