A plain language summary of LocoMMotion – an observational study of treatments used for pretreated multiple myeloma

What is this summary about?This is a Plain Language Summary of Publication of the LocoMMotion study, an observational study in which researchers monitored patients living with multiple myeloma and the treatments that they received in real-world clinical practice. LocoMMotion studied patients with relapsed/refractory multiple myeloma who were triple-class exposed. The researchers wanted to find out how well patients responded to different types of treatment over a 2-year follow-up period.What were the results?In total, 248 patients with relapsed/refractory multiple myeloma were enrolled in the study from August 2, 2019 until October 26, 2020. During the study, 91 different types of treatment were used, which shows the lack of standard treatment for patients with triple-class exposed relapsed/refractory multiple myeloma. Nearly one third of patients (31.9%) had a positive response (i.e. the number of tumor cells reduced), to the first treatment they received after enrolling in this study. Half of patients responded to treatment for at least 7.4 months.Overall, half of patients in the study remained alive for at least 13.8 months. Just over half of the patient group (53.4%) were alive one year into the study. Overall, 63.7% of patients did not survive during the study, mainly due to their cancer getting worse, which occurred in 67.7% of these cases. In total, 8.5% of patients had at least one side effect that resulted in death, most commonly due to infections (5.2%). Based on responses to a questionnaire about their treatment and symptoms,patients said that the current treatments did not noticeably improve their quality of life. For example, 53.3% of patients did not have any meaningful improvement in pain during treatment.What do the results mean?In this study, most patients with relapsed/refractory multiple myeloma did not have a long-lasting response to treatment, and many patients received subsequent therapies after the initial study therapy. Additionally, the many different treatments used show that there is not a standardized treatment for patients with triple-class exposed relapsed/refractory multiple myeloma. Lastly, the quality of patients’ lives did not improve much during their treatment, which highlights the need for new treatments. LocoMMotion was an observational and non-randomized study, so may have some limitations that mean data must be interpreted carefully. Some baseline patient information and laboratory assessments may have been missing, and the study did not have a comparative group.[Box: see text].