Method Developed to Ultrasensitively Detect Residual Disease in the Blood of Multiple Myeloma Patients

Multiple myeloma is a subject of hematological cancer that spreads in the bone marrow and has undergone significant advances in treatment. Currently, it is estimated that the progression-free survival rate exceeds 80% at five years in patients with negative minimal residual disease, which implies that more and more invasive programs of study are being carried out to confirm this response over time. It is therefore crucial to establish accurate monitoring systems to assess stability against disease progression in less invasive samples such as peripheral blood.

Several groups from the cancer area of the CIBER (CIBERONC) at the Cima University of Navarra, integrated in the Cancer Center Clínica Universidad de Navarra, have developed a method, called BloodFlow, that ultra-sensitively detects residual disease in the blood of patients with multiple myeloma. "Our procedure combines immunomagnetic enrichment of plasma cells present in large volumes of blood, followed by state-of-the-art flow cytometry to identify tumor cells. For the first time we have been able to achieve a sensitivity that allows the detection of one tumor cell among 10 million normal cells (10-7)," explains Dr. Bruno Paiva, principal researcher of the Multiple Myelomagroup at Cima and director the study. "This has made it possible to identify those patients with a higher risk of progression due to the presence of circulating tumor cells in the blood."

A new method already in use in other countries

This methodology has been applied to blood samples from more than 300 patients belonging to the Spanish Myeloma group (GEM-PETHEMA). "Our work demonstrates that BloodFlow significantly improves the clinical follow-up of patients, without the need for invasive bone marrow testing, " says Dr. Paiva. The results have been published in the latest issue of the scientific journal Blood.

The scientific staff concludes that BloodFlow is an innovativetool that significantly improves the detection of residual disease in peripheral blood and offers a more accurate and dynamic assessment of disease status in patients with multiple myeloma. It therefore has great potential to optimize therapeutic approaches and improve clinical outcomes. "This method is already being tested in centers in the U.S. and Germany, and our group plans to investigate its value in other tumors such as acute myeloblastic leukemia and lymphomas," concludes the Cima expert.

The study, carried out within the framework of the cancer area of the CIBER (CIBERONC CB16/12/00369), has received public funding from the Instituto de Salud Carlos III. It has also received support from private institutions such as the Riney Family Foundation, the CRIS Foundation against Cancer and the Spanish association Against Cancerproject publisher).