Multiple myeloma is a type of blood cancer that appears mainly after the age of sixty. Its incidence, therefore, increases with the aging of the population. In this pathology, the bone marrow, the porous structure within the bones that produces normal blood cells, is invaded by an overgrowth of the so-called plasma cells.
These cells, which in healthy conditions are part of the immune system and help prevent infections, have been transformed and, in addition to destroying the bone marrow, end up escaping and causing lesions in other locations such as the spine, skull, pelvis and ribs. Current treatments can control the disease, even for quite a long time, but a definitive cure does not yet exist. With the development of new generations of immunotherapy , using either antibodies or whole immune cells engineered to act as drugs, a new window of opportunity arises to treat patients that relapse or are refractory to standard treatment.
Today, an article published in the journal Leukemia , from the Nature group, directed by Dr. Manel Esteller, ICREA Research Professor at the Josep Carreras Leukaemia Research Institute (IJC) and Chairman of Genetics at School of Medicine of the University of Barcelona, co-led by Dr. Gerardo Ferrer and fist-authored by Laura Martínez-Verbo from the same centre, shows how an epigenetic test could determine the efficacy of new immunotherapy treatments against multiple myeloma.
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