Canada has approved a first-of-its-kind drug for multiple myeloma, a significant advancement in the treatment of a cancer that has no cure, with patients going through repeated cycles of remission and relapse.
Myeloma is a cancer of the bone marrow and blood, easily confused by name with melanoma, which is a serious skin disease. The disease forms in plasma cells, which, when healthy, create antibodies that fight infections.
“When the infection’s gone, they should become quiet. In myeloma, it doesn’t shut off when the invader is gone, and it crosses the line to become cancerous. So it grows and grows in the bone marrow,” explains Dr. Donna Reece, one of Canada’s leading authorities on multiple myeloma.
Myeloma leads to bone destruction and often presents as fatigue and back pain, common for many, and is why it often goes undetected.
That’s how Mary Ann Tuomi was diagnosed with multiple myeloma at age 58.
“In May of 2021, I was teaching remotely, and I had severe, severe back pain. I had tried chiropractors, physiotherapists, even bought an adjustable bed,” she said. “I ended up in the hospital and spent two weeks in the hospital with a compression fracture on one vertebra.”
Four years later, after chemotherapy and a stem cell transplant, Tuomi is on continued maintenance treatment to slow its growth.
“It will hopefully keep working for a while, but eventually those myeloma cells will again take over. Every patient is different. We never know when we’re going to relapse.”
Dr. Reece says a new drug approved by Health Canada, known as an antibody-drug conjugate, has a unique mechanism that can provide years of disease control. It’s administered after patients have gone through a stem cell transplant and one prior line of therapy.
“Blenrep is an antibody made in the lab to stick to myeloma cells. It doesn’t just stick on the tumour cell and neutralize it; it has a poison attached to it that is then targeting the myeloma cell and kills it that way, too,” explains Reece. “One of the advantages of this drug over other immune treatments is that it’s what we call off-the-shelf. So you can just order it, patients can go to the chemo suite, and there’s no need to prepare it in any way.”
Reece says the development is an important addition to the myeloma treatment toolbox.
“I described to patients that the strategy is like beads in a chain. Each treatment is a bead, and as long as we have another bead, when the disease reactivates, we can suppress it. There are a number of immune treatments that are coming out that, as a group of therapies, have revolutionized myeloma care and other cancers, so that now the beads in the chain are significantly longer, which is incredibly exciting.”
Tuomi points out that when her father was diagnosed with the same disease back in 2020 at the age of 80, he was given three to five years because the current research and new courses of treatment were not available.
“But with all the new treatments, I’m hoping for 20, 25 years, and every time there is new research and a new drug available that gives a patient another course of treatment to have available to them, it gives a person hope that they’re going to be able to live a long life.”
