trending Market Intelligence /marketintelligence/en/news-insights/trending/kLFbVjt0OBb4Jo-1VrqGyQ2 content esgSubNav
In This List

Blood cancer trends may miss mark for African-American patients, study says

Blog

A Pharmaceutical Company Capitalizes on M&A Activity with Brokerage Research

Blog

2021 Year in Review: Highlighting Key Investment Banking Trends

Blog

Insight Weekly: US stock performance; banks' M&A risk; COVID-19 vaccine makers' earnings

Blog

Global M&A By the Numbers: Q3 2021


Blood cancer trends may miss mark for African-American patients, study says

Targeted treatments for the blood cancer known as multiple myeloma may not be as effective for African-American patients as they are for white patients — despite African-American males, in particular, being three times more likely to have the disease, according to a study in PLOS Genetics from the Keck School of Medicine at University of Southern California.

Increasingly, drugmakers are exploring a targeted approach, or precision medicine, that focuses on certain gene mutations for treating cancer. Yet when a mutation is far more prevalent in one population than another, these approaches may be too precise. Although African-Americans have a much higher expression of a BCL7A gene mutation, a lot of research has focused on the TP53 mutation that patients of European descent are six times more likely to have, researchers said.

Meanwhile, African-Americans are two times more likely than white people to die from multiple myeloma, according to the study.

"A cancer therapy that targets TP53 would not be as effective for African-Americans with multiple myeloma as it would be for a white population because doctors would be trying to fix the wrong mutated gene," said Zarko Manojlovic, lead author of the study and assistant professor of research translational genomics at the Keck School.

Researchers analyzed the genetic sequencing of 718 multiple myeloma patients, which they said is the largest and most ethnically diverse genomic study for the disease to date. Among the patients, 127 were of African descent and 591 were of European descent.

About 30,280 people will be diagnosed with the cancer this year and roughly half will survive longer than five years, according to National Cancer Institute figures cited by the researchers.

Another author of the study, John Carpten, noted that this is a "relatively easy-to-treat cancer" yet African-American patients still have a lower survival rate. "In the past decade, new treatments for the disease have spurred a remarkable improvement in survival for myeloma patients, but those benefits have disproportionately increased survival rates for Caucasian patients," Carpten said.

A wide range of current treatments for the disease exist, and they are usually used in combination therapies, but a relatively new class known as proteasome inhibitors specifically targets the TP53 protein. Takeda Pharmaceutical Co. Ltd. makes two of these inhibitors, Ninlaro and Velcade, while Amgen Inc. makes another, Kyprolis. A number of studies featuring these drugs will be presented at the upcoming American Society of Hematology conference, including a combination study for Velcade and Celgene Corp.'s Revlimid, a drug that focuses on bolstering the immune system's ability to fight the disease.

Another abstract shared ahead of the conference concluded that precision-based multiple myeloma treatment, or an approach that focused on individual patients' genomes, should be pursued when possible. In this study, 16% of the patients had detectable TP53 proteins, but the presence of the BCL7A mutation was not noted.