A time of hope

Rudolph Byrd has built a career teaching students about literature, race and the civil rights movement. For the past decade, he’s been teaching in a different way: informing researchers about cancer – in his own body. Through his participation in several clinical trials at Winship Cancer Institute, he’s helped doctors such as Sagar Lonial, MD, identify drugs that now have become part of a standard regimen for people battling multiple myeloma.

Survival rates for multiple myeloma, a blood cell cancer, have traditionally been grim. Effects of multiple myeloma’s malignant growth can include bone breakdown, kidney failure and anemia. Twenty years ago, most patients died within two or three years after diagnosis.

In the past decade, several new drugs have been developed and approved for use in multiple myeloma, including bortezomib, thalidomide and its cousin lenalidomide. Lonial has been integrally involved in many of the studies that led to the approval of these new drugs, and he currently is leading a nationwide trial on the use of lenalidomide to treat smoldering myeloma, or myeloma that is asymptomatic at diagnosis.

Together with traditional chemotherapy and stem cell transplantation, new therapies have doubled average survival times. The greatest benefit is seen in patients younger than 60, though these new drugs are helping all ages now, Lonial says.

Byrd’s experience illustrates these trends. He was diagnosed with multiple myeloma in 2000 while on sabbatical in Boston. Then 47, he decided to return home for treatment. His internist advised him to contact Lonial, then a new faculty member at Winship. Lonial says a mentor in Boston, Ken Anderson, MD, had urged him to begin testing a promising drug against multiple myeloma.

“I’ve been honored to be an adviser and watch Sagar Lonial develop a world-class multiple myeloma program at Winship,” says Anderson, who heads DanaFarber Cancer Institute’s multiple myeloma program. “He recognized from the earliest days that bortezomib,

By Quinn Eastman | Illustrations by Brian Stauffer