Monday, May 6, 2013

Things that make you go, "hmmmm"

IMF Video:

Multiple Myeloma: International Myeloma Foundation : Live! The Boca Raton Patient & Family Seminar

If you click the link and zip ahead to ~1:31:54 you will hear Dr. R say something along the lines of...antibodies...there is an emerging role of vaccination for minimal disease...moving toward tailored treatment and the goal of a functional cure...driving quality of life.  Something like that. ;)

THEN ...

This next part of the discussion made me really take notice. Dr. RK, who is like the godfather of MGUS, was asked, "How do you see things moving forward?"


His response, which I found very, very interesting was this:


I think in the long, long, future what we need to address is smoldering myeloma and MGUS which are the precursors of multiple myeloma. Something has happened to that patient that allows this clone of plasma cells to escape and then it is limited in the case of MGUS and then in the patient of smoldering myeloma it's limited a little later on...the body has allowed that clone to grow larger and then for for some unforeseen reason has stopped its progression as well. So I think ultimately, if we can get to the point where we can do something about the MGUS when it appears if we can do something to wipe out that clone at that point in time we wont have to worry about anything else and that's the ultimate long, long, term goal.


Hmmm.... well, okay... So, in the "long, long" future they need need to address smoldering myeloma and MGUS and the ultimate "long, long" term goal is to do something about MGUS when it first appears? Um, how about let's make this a goal now?! :)

I watched to the end of this video... some interesting discussion around MGUS and SMM.

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