Characteristics of a Comprehensive, Continuously Updated Longitudinal Database for Multiple Myeloma

Introduction:

Despite the availability of many effective agents, multiple myeloma is characterized by repeated cycles of treatment response and relapse, and remains incurable in almost all patients. Efforts to optimize treatment are complicated by variation in disease biology and by the combinatorial complexity inherent in assembling, sequencing and administering multi-agent regimens. Determining which strategies provide maximal therapeutic benefit requires deploying a variety of multi-agent regimens in a range of settings and assessing long-term outcomes; information that cannot be readily discerned from clinical trials. Here we present results from a real-world database that comprehensively tracks all treatments and responses in patients with multiple myeloma.

Methods:

Since March 2017, All4Cure has hosted an online platform for patients with multiple myeloma, clinicians and researchers that has been initially focused in the Pacific Northwest. Medical records from consenting patients are collected and information regarding all treatments and responses graphically displayed on their de-identified dashboards. A discussion panel allows for asynchronous communication between members of All4Cure's community of patients, clinicians and researchers (currently numbering over 1600 participants). There is no charge to patients who participate in All4Cure, and clinicians and researchers are neither charged nor paid for their participation. A summarized real-world database describes the lines of therapy that each patient has received, treatment start and stop dates, and responses in accordance with International Myeloma Working Group (IMWG) criteria.

Results:

The overall profile of patients with multiple myeloma enrolled in All4Cure (N=555) was benchmarked against myeloma patients from the National Program of Cancer Registries (NPCR) (diagnosis year 2017; N=25,895). Patients in all 50 States and D.C. were included in the comparison, and those with monoclonal gammopathy of undetermined significance (MGUS) were not considered. Myeloma patients enrolled in All4Cure are younger at diagnosis or start of treatment (median 61 versus between 65 and 69), more likely to be white (90.3% versus 73.5%), and more likely to reside in Washington State (41.2% versus 2%) compared to the NPCR cohort, reflecting participation influenced by geographic location as described above.

After enrollment, All4Cure patients are followed longitudinally throughout the entirety of their disease course, with fewer than 2% having been lost to follow up. To gain insights uniquely available from the All4Cure database and to inform the future direction for our research, we focus our exploratory data analysis on the All4Cure cohort of patients who started treatment in June 2015 or later (N=299). Despite the relatively recent start of the All4Cure database, this timeframe allows up to 6 years of observation following the start of treatment, since the survival rates for the first 1-2 years of treatment are generally very high. Consistent with prior knowledge, increasing age and disease stage are associated with increased morality, as are high-risk cytogenetics such as 17p-, t(4:14) and t(14;16).

We further explored the potential impact of early lines of therapy on long-term disease control. While the current literature is mixed on the merits of aggressive treatments in early lines of therapy in terms of overall survival, insights from our data suggest that more aggressive front-line therapies (such as SCT) are associated with improved disease control over time, although this is evolving with the impact of novel therapies and in particular the use of triplet and now quadruplet induction regimens and adapting treatment to achieve measurable residual disease (MRD) negativity.

Conclusions:

Even with the current limitations regarding the size and representativeness of All4Cure's database, these preliminary results support the validity of this approach for gaining insight into the treatments and outcomes of patients with multiple myeloma in real-world settings.