How HARMONY will help myeloma research

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Published: 23 Nov 2017
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Prof Mario Boccadoro - University of Turin

Prof Mario Boccadoro of the University of Turin talks to ecancer at the HARMONY 2017 meeting in Berlin. He discusses the potential size of the datasets used and how they can easily increase. He also explains that this number could lead to narrowing down treatments for myeloma. 

We are involved in the… myeloma is the haematological disease that we are involved and it’s really important because, as you know, myeloma has the star right now because there are so many possibilities, so many new drugs, so many alternatives. So it’s very important to have big numbers that will be able to tell us which is the best treatment for each individual myeloma patient. We already have a lot of data and I think that we are ready to give to HARMONY the patients we have, the data that we have already collected; we have about 5,000 patients. We have the agreement of the people that already collected this data to update this data. I think that also the pharma will give us the data that we have for the large randomised study that has been done during the last past five or six years so before the end of the year I think that we will be able to collect at least maybe 10,000 patients. So it’s a project that is going faster.

Is this the largest number of patient data you’ve been able to gather before?

Yes, probably yes. We were able to collect 5,000 but with the collaboration of the European group we’ll be able to increase that number easily.

Is narrowing down treatment options for myeloma a realistic 5 year target?

Absolutely. There are so many subsets of patients that we need big numbers to have the answer. Young versus old, this is the easiest, but patients with cytogenetic abnormalities, with renal failure, transplanted versus non-transplanted. So there are so many questions that only the big numbers can tell us what we have to do. But I think that in a short period of time we will have some, at least preliminary, answers.