Exploring the Immune Microenvironment in Multiple Myeloma Treatment

At the 2024 Lymphoma, Leukemia & Myeloma (LL&M) Congress in New York, New York, Bruno Paiva, PhD, University of Navarra, Pamplona, Spain, shared expert insight into the immune determinants of response and resistance among patients with multiple myeloma (MM).

“I think this is a very timely and important topic for which there is a lot of interest [and] ongoing research, but still lack of robust data to make it to the clinics. I think that the time is now for us as a community to make that effort and bring immune biomarkers to the clinic, to patient workup,” concluded Dr Paiva.

Transcript:

I'm Bruno Paiva, director of flow cytometry and myeloma research at University of Navarra in Pamplona, Spain, and I am here at LL&M [2024]. During this meeting, I [had] the opportunity to talk about immune determinants of response and resistance in patients with multiple myeloma.

I think this is a very timely and important topic for which there is a lot of interest [and] ongoing research, but still lack of robust data to make it to the clinics. I think that the time is now for us as a community to make that effort and bring immune biomarkers to the clinic, to patient workup. The reason I say this is because, as we all know, newer immunotherapies are revolutionizing the treatment of patients with myeloma, first at the time of relapse, but probably in the future in the frontline setting.

It is important to note that risk models for patient stratification and eventually treatment individualization rely mainly on tumor burden and genetic characteristics and were developed before the immunotherapy era. Now that we are in the immunotherapy era, we need to implement immune biomarkers into those models.

And [a] final comment, and this will also be presented during my lecture, is that while we are at identifying and hopefully implementing new immune biomarkers to predict treatment, efficacy, and patient survival, we should also think on other important clinical features such as the risk of severe infection as infection remains the highest cause of morbidity and mortality in patients with myeloma.

Source:

Paiva B. The Immune Microenvironment in Myeloma-Therapeutic Implications. Presented at Lymphoma, Leukemia & Myeloma Congress; October 16-19, 2024. New York, NY.