Dr Ola Landgren Highlights Safety and Efficacy of Adding Daratumumab to Combination Therapy in MM

Daratumumab will likely become a part of most combination therapies for patients with newly diagnosed multiple myeloma because it safely adds efficacy, according to Ola Landgren, MD, PhD, professor of medicine and chief of the Myeloma Program at the University of Miami, and leader of the Experimental Therapeutics Program at Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center.

Transcript

Clinical guidelines for newly diagnosed patients with multiple myeloma include combination therapy. What have you seen regarding safety and efficacy when daratumumab is added to commonly used combination regimens for these patients?

Daratumumab was approved here in the United States in November 2015, initially for patients who were heavily pretreated and as a single drug. And within less than a year, the label was updated to combination therapy for relapsed/refractory patients. And then after that, it just has continued to move forward.

We now, in the US, have daratumumab approved for newly diagnosed patients. It was initially approved in combination with immune steroids, and the [National Comprehensive Cancer Network] guideline has also added proteasome inhibition immune steroids in the front-ine setting. There are combinations with therapies that we normally would not use in the US that already are FDA approved also for the newly diagnosed setting, and these include oral melphalan and thalidomide. Typically, we would not use those as much here in the US, in particular in newly diagnosed patients.

I think looking across the board for all the trials, looking for these approvals I mentioned, it is clear that daratumumab can safely be added to all these backbones, and it seems to add efficacy. I think daratumumab probably will be part of most of the combination therapies for newly diagnosed patients in the future.

And we see the same pattern happening outside the United States in Europe. This is starting to happen also in Asia and other parts of the world.