Elizabeth Lightbody, PhD, at #ASH23 presented results from a study identifying proteins that could serve as potential markers for disease progression & high-risk #multiplemyeloma, furthering Dana-Farber research in early detection.
The research that we're presenting at ash this year revolves around how we can utilize liquid biopsy samples for patients that have precursor multiple myeloma. So patients that have mono nemy of undetermined significance or MGUS and smoldering multiple myeloma. And currently, right now, MGUS and smoldering patients need to undergo bone marrow biopsy samples in order to correctly stage them on the MGUS to multiple myeloma disease spectrum. However, bone marrow biopsies are an invasive and painful procedure for patients. And we also know that MGUS and smoldering patients have a different rate of progression to multiple myeloma where some patients will rapidly progress and others will progress much later or may not progress at all. And we currently don't have um indicators that correctly classify which patients are these high risk patients at risk of progressing. Um So right now, we're looking at how we can use the advanced technologies and proteomics to correctly classify different levels of proteins that are present in blood samples um in order to identify new high risk biomarkers. So we did plasma proteomics profiling on 400 patients including MGUS smoldering and overt multiple myeloma patients. And we looked at measuring over 3000 proteins. And ultimately, our key takeaways from our study were that we found we could correctly discriminate um disease patients from healthy patients by using the proteomics profile of these patients. But really excitingly, we found that by looking at patients that had progressive disease versus stable disease, we identified five proteins that were significantly elevated at the precursor stage of disease. Meaning we five proteins that were significantly elevated in patients that ended up progressing to multiple myeloma. So these may represent new high risk biomarkers that we could assess using blood samples instead of bone marrow samples to identify patients that may need more constant monitoring or a higher level of surveillance in the precursor stages of disease and may benefit from earlier treatment.
