Steroids Blog

As per findings of the Rush University Medical Center, Revlimid offers “unprecedented” survival for patients fighting against multiple myeloma.

Multiple Myeloma is a form of blood cancer, which occurs in the blood making cells of the bone marrow.

It was revealed in the findings that patients treated with Revlimid, an oral drug, had a median survival of almost three years that is considered as the longest median survival for bone marrow cancer patients.

From News-Medical.Net:

Revlimid is an immunomodulatory agent, a drug that can modify or regulate the functioning of the immune system. It is the newest of what are called the novel therapies that have changed the outlook for myeloma patients. It is an oral drug that can be taken at home, and because it targets the cancer cells directly along with factors that support their growth, it does not have the difficult side effects associated with most chemotherapy.

“We are pleased that aggressive efforts to find effective treatments in what was considered a rare, little-known cancer, have led to drugs with broad implications for understanding, treating and eventually curing so many forms of the disease,” said Susie Novis, president and co-founder of the International Myeloma Foundation. “Myeloma has been a difficult disease to cure, but with novel therapies we are developing effective, long-term treatments by using multiple drugs in sequence and in various combinations. The addition of a drug with the potency of Revlimid to this equation is especially important.”

In Europe and the U.S. Revlimid has been approved for use in multiple myeloma, and in the U.S. it is also approved for a pre-leukemia condition called MDS. It is also being tested in other leukemias and lymphomas and even solid tumors.

Dr. Stephanie Gregory, the director of the section of Hematology at Rush University Medical Center suggested that there needs to be an utmost urgency in finding potential treatment to fight bone marrow cancer and Revlimid can prove to be beneficial in this regard.

Multiple myeloma occurs when the body makes an abnormally high number of cancerous plasma cells. When healthy, plasma cells help to protect the body from infection and disease by forming antibodies that attack foreign substances. But when the body makes too many plasma cells that all make the same type of antibody, this leads to multiple myeloma, causing damage to bones, overabundance of calcium in the blood, anemia, and weakening of the immune system.

Fortunately, the researchers at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center report that treatment with a steroid pill improves the overall survival of patients with multiple myeloma, a cancer of the plasma cells in bone marrow.

From Bio-medicine:

In the study, the researchers compared patients with multiple myeloma receiving prednisone in pill-form following a response to treatment with one of two chemotherapy combinations: vincristine, doxorubicin and dexamethasone with prednisone or with or without quinine, which has been found to increase the effectiveness of chemotherapy. Treatment with either of the chemotherapy combinations was repeated every 21 days for at least six months or until patients achieved at least a 25 percent reduction in tumor size. After a 53-month follow-up period, the investigators found that there was no difference in either progression-free or overall survival between the patients receiving chemotherapy with or without quinine.

To determine whether prednisone alone was effective as maintenance therapy, patients who responded to treatment with up-front chemotherapy were randomly selected to receive either 10 (the amount that the body normally makes daily) or 50 mg of prednisone every other day until their disease progressed.

The team will still conduct future studies to examine whether prednisone is effective to prolong remission for patients with other cancers such as leukemia or lymphoma. In addition, other drug combinations that include prednisone will be evaluated as maintenance therapy for patients with multiple myeloma.