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    Clinical Trials

    Program: Contemporary Issues in Relapsed-Refractory Myeloma
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    Andrew Schorr:

    Okay. Let's jump up to northern California there, Sasha in San Francisco wants to know about clinical trials. Sasha, go right ahead.

    Caller:

    I was wondering if you can recommend any current clinical trials?

    Dr. Berenson:

    Well, I think all of these are good trials to be involved in and help move the field forward. We're certainly doing a number of our own with Velcade combinations as well as with the histone deacetylase inhibitors, so called HDAC inhibitors. We're very excited about these. I think at this point I'm not going to tell you to do one over the next. They're all trials. We're trying to make these things work.

    We're even using radiopharmaceuticals now, drugs like Quadramet from Cytogen, which is kind of like Zometa but has a radioactive hook on it, so it goes to the bone and is able to radiate the bone marrow where the myeloma is. And with Velcade, which is not only very good at making chemo work better but radiation, it seems to work very well together.

    So there's a lot of different trials out there. I urge your participation and all my patients' participation in trials. Most of my patients do enroll in trials and do enroll in multiple different trials, and they're able to get drugs that aren't even FDA approved such as the one you mentioned, the heat shock protein inhibitor and the [paraphosine]. These are ones that are certainly not FDA approved yet.

    Andrew Schorr:

    Right. I'm just going to make a pitch for clinical trials. Now, folks, you know I'm not a multiple myeloma patient, but I was diagnosed with a leukemia, a chronic lymphocytic leukemia, and so I decided to be in a phase II trial, and I think it made a big difference for me. So I would certainly urge you to look into that and see whether, you know, not only will you help advance research but whether it may be right for you. And if you're lucky enough to have a specialist that you may be working with, a subspecialist like Dr. Berenson, you can discuss that and make an informed decision.

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