New treatment for multiple myeloma

Multiple myeloma is a rare blood cancer that sees about 35,000 new diagnoses a year in the United States. Once thought to be incurable, treatment improvements for the cancer have led to better outcomes for patients.

Dr. Rafael Fonseca is a hematologist at Mayo Clinic Arizona, who leads a team of researchers working to create a better future for patients with multiple myeloma.

When Dr. Fonseca began at Mayo Clinic in 1998, there were only two drugs to treat multiple myeloma with a survival rate of about two years. Now in 2025, he is seeing a growing number of his patients living twenty years post diagnosis.

Dr. Fonseca joined “Arizona Horizon” to discuss the improvements in treatment of multiple myeloma and the introduction of better diagnostics and better immunologic treatments.

Myeloma is a cancer that arises from the bone marrow, according to Dr. Fonseca. “It is a cancer that results from the abnormal growth of the cells that would normally protect us by producing antibodies,” Dr. Fonseca said. “The cells can go rogue and if they grow in an excessive way that’s what leads to the cancer.”

Treatments for the disease were more limited back in the day according to Dr. Fonseca. “When I started training it was old fashion chemotherapy,” Dr. Fonseca said. “We were using pills that were considered in the chemotherapy category. And ever since we’ve come a long way, where we now bring in small molecules, targeted treatments, and most importantly I think immunotherapy approaches.”

The advancements in using immunotherapy, where doctors use the body’s own cells to fight against the cancer, have been especially groundbreaking in fighting myeloma. “People had a hard time at the beginning to know how to harness a person’s immune system to fight back cancer,” Dr. Fonseca said.

“Cancer, at the end of it all, it’s a failure of our immune system to have recognized those cells as cancer. So now through genetic engineering and also through biotechnology we can actually prime the person’s own immune cells to go and fight back very specifically against those cancer cells.”