Recently Diagnosed or Relapsed? Stop Looking For a Miracle Cure, and Use Evidence-Based Therapies To Enhance Your Treatment and Prolong Your Remission
Multiple Myeloma an incurable disease, but I have spent the last 25 years in remission using a blend of conventional oncology and evidence-based nutrition, supplementation, and lifestyle therapies from peer-reviewed studies that your oncologist probably hasn't told you about.
Click the orange button to the right to learn more about what you can start doing today.
“This real-life survey indicates that re-treatment including bortezomib as a first salvage therapy could be still considered in MM patients achieving durable response after initial exposure to bortezomib.”
Multi-drug resistance (MDR) develops in almost all multiple myeloma survivors…eventually. If a MM patient could figure out how to avoid MDR, he/she could treat MM as a chronic disease like diabetes or hypertension.
The first study linked and excerpted below documents how 71% of 134 multiple myeloma patients responded to re-treatment or a rechallenge of their multiple myeloma with Bortezomib aka Velcade at relapse. These MM survivors responded without any help from any other therapies, conventional or non-conventional.
The last study linked and excerpted below cites a concept in modern conventional oncology of synergism between two or more toxic chemotherapy regimens. Consider synergism between a conventional chemotherapy regimen such as bortezomib and a non-toxic supplement such as curcumin.
A hurdle slowing the MM patient’s quest to rechallenge his/her incurable blood cancer is structural. Conventional oncology considers any therapy not approved by the Food and Drug Administration to be inadmissible.
Despite studies confirming the ability of each supplement listed below to sensitizing MM cells to Bortezomib, conventional oncology simply does not entertain the therapy that MM can become re-sensitized to bortezomib/velcade or to put it another way, conventional oncology does not consider the possibility that Bortezomib can rechallenge MM.
Scores of relapsed/refractory multiple myeloma survivors reach multidrug resistance and are told that they “have reached the end of the line” or that there are no other therapies for them to try.
Please consider rechallenging your MM to velcade/bortezomib by also undergoing evidence-based but non-toxic, non-conventional integrative therapies.
If you have any questions about managing your MM, scroll down the page, post a question or comment and I will reply to you ASAP.
“Challenge–dechallenge–rechallenge (CDR) is a medical testing protocol in which a medicine or drug is administered, withdrawn, then re-administered, while being monitored for adverse effects at each stage…
“In this Review, we describe the anticancer agents used in these treatment strategies and discuss the potential mechanisms explaining the apparent tumour re-sensitization with reintroduced or continued therapy…
“Therapeutic re-challenge is currently a debated issue in the field of multiple myeloma (MM), given the recent availability of several new drugs and combinations. However, very few specific evidences are available about bortezomib re-use at first relapse.
This multicenter, observational, retrospective study enrolled 134 MM patients with significant response after bortezomib-based frontline regimens and who had received a first salvage treatment containing bortezomib at relapse.
The overall response rate was 71%, including 40% partial responses, 24% very good partial responses, and 7% complete responses. Re-treatment was well-tolerated, with no significant new or unexpected toxicities observed.
The median duration of second progression-free survival (PFS) was 15 months, while median PFS2 was 55 months. With a median follow-up of 56 months, overall survival was 94 months for the entire series, without significant differences between patients undergoing or not undergoing transplant procedures.
This real-life survey indicates that re-treatment including bortezomib as a first salvage therapy could be still considered in MM patients achieving durable response after initial exposure to bortezomib.”
“Combination therapy is quite common in modern chemotherapy treatment since drugs often work synergistically, and it is an important progression in the use of the LCL model to expand work for drug combinations. In the present work, we demonstrate that synergy occurs and can be quantified in LCLs across a range of clinically important drug combinations…
The current paradigm in cancer treatment is moving toward combination chemotherapy—the use of more than one medication simultaneously (Greco et al., 1996; Foucquier and Guedj, 2015). Since chemotherapy drugs can affect cancer cells at different points in the cell cycle, using a combination of drugs increases the chance that all of the cancer cells are eliminated and that resistance is prevented…
Ultimately, combination therapy approaches are optimized for synergistic interactions—where the effect of the combination interacts in a nonadditive way for improved outcomes (Musgrove et al., 2011; Janku et al., 2014). Recent studies have demonstrated higher response rates with combinations of drugs compared to monotherapies…
For example, a recent study of solid cancers showed that in most clinical cases combination therapies are needed to avoid the evolution of resistance to targeted drugs (Bozic et al., 2013). Furthermore, they find that the simultaneous administration of multiple targeted drugs minimizes the chance of relapse when no single mutation confers cross-resistance to both drugs (Bozic et al., 2013)…
Synergy Within LCLs
Both synergy and antagonism were observed within the LCLs across varying doses and drug combinations. We saw a range of CI values shown in Figure 2. A breakdown of the combination indices for each specific dosage combination in the various drug mixtures can be found in the Supplementary Table 1. There is a wide range of values for each of the doses and combinations, with a consistent general pattern that many of the drug combinations showed more synergistic interactions at lower doses…
The researchers found that treatment with Velcade led to a physiological reaction that actually reinforced the intensity of the myeloma in the mice (MM relapse…)
I am a long-term MM survivor and MM cancer coach who has remained in complete remission from multiple myeloma since 4/99. The article linked and excerpted below is one of a number of articles that raise the possibility that Velcade (Bortezomib) may actually cause your MM to grow. Velcade may actually cause a multiple myeloma relapse.
If you are undergoing toxic chemotherapy of any kind, please read the info below.
Chemotherapy such as Velcade can is cytotoxic to Multiple Myeloma.
Chemotherapy causes collateral damage aka side effects. Everyone knows this.
Multiple Myeloma always relapses. Everyone knows this too.
Could the chemo that kills your myeloma also make your myeloma grow?
If ever there was a study that reinforces the need for MM patients to undergo integrative therapies along with their conventional (FDA approved) therapies, it is the article linked and excerpted below.
The article/study below explains that the inflammation caused by chemotherapy, Velcade in this case, also causes the cancer, Multiple Myeloma in this case, to become more aggressive and spread. The chemotherapy that puts us into remission also makes our multiple myeloma more aggressive.
What is a MMer to do? The article talks about “working on various ways to inhibit the body’s response to anti-cancer treatments…” Until conventional oncology identifies ways to “inhibit the body’s response to anti-cancer treatments,” include evidence-based, non-toxic, anti-inflammatory nutrition, supplementation, bone health, lifestyle and bone health to your therapy regimen.
Please watch the video below to learn more about the evidence-based, integrative therapies to combat treatment side effects and enhance your chemotherapy.
“Even with today’s safer and more targeted anti-cancer drugs, scientists have been unable to satisfactorily explain the phenomenon of why treated cancers so often recur. The common theory is that the cancer cell develops “internal resistance to treatment,” and overrides the toxic effects of the drug…
In their study published in The Journal of Pathology, the team shows that tumor relapse occurs when the body, in effect, mobilizes itself in favor of the tumor, causing recurrence of the disease, increasing its aggressiveness and creating metastases or tumor spread. Even selective, highly focused treatments that harm cancer cells almost exclusively lead to a similar response.
“The administration of an anti-cancer drug is very aggressive intervention in the body,” explains Prof. Shaked. “Therefore, the body responds to chemotherapy the way it responds to trauma. This creates the effect of a double-edged sword: although chemotherapy kills cancer cells, it also causes the secretion of substances that confer resistance to the tumor. Even more selective treatments, with fewer side effects, cause physiological reactions that increase the aggressiveness of the disease.”
In this specific study, among other studies the group has published in this area, mice with multiple myeloma — a malignant disease of the plasma cells produced in bone marrow and spread throughout the body via the circulatory system — were treated with the selective anti-cancer drug Velcade (bortezomib). (Velcade is based on the discovery of ubiquitin, for which Professors Avram Hershko and Aaron Ciechanover of the Technion Faculty of Medicine won the Nobel Prize.)
The researchers found that treatment with Velcade led to a physiological reaction that actually reinforced the intensity of the myeloma in the mice. According to Prof. Shaked, the drug caused inflammatory cells (macrophages) in the bone marrow to enhance the aggressiveness of the disease and provide the cancer cells with resistance to treatment.
“It is important to clarify that treatment with Velcade is essential and necessary,” says Prof. Shaked, “but its disadvantage is that along with the benefit there is damage.”
Next steps: inhibiting the mechanism that enhances the tumor
According to Prof. Shaked, “…understanding the mechanisms that enhance the tumor and accelerate the spread of metastases will enable us to develop methods to inhibit them.”
In fact, when the researchers inhibited the secreted factor related to the activity of inflammatory cells, they observed a decrease in the proliferation of cancer cells. Now they are working on various ways to inhibit the body’s response to anti-cancer treatments.
“Ultimately we are talking about a trade-off between the intensity of the treatment and the intensity of the physical response. The moment the ratio is in favor of the treatment and to the detriment of the response, we will achieve effective treatment without a ‘fine’ in the form of enhanced metastasis. In addition, we can inhibit the body’s response using existing drugs, thereby enabling the anticancer drugs to get the job done.””
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2 comments
Ronald Quasebarth says
a couple of years ago
Thanks PBC for these valuable resources. I’m still with out need for treatment now for 52 months after diagnosis. PBC’s information is part of that.
52 months is more than four years. That is excellent.
I don’t want to be nosey but if you could elaborate on your experiences, I would greatly appreciate it. I am not looking for a plug- I am curious to know if you, for example, supplemented with curcumin, omega-3, etc. to remain pre-mm or to keep your m-spike low.
