WVU Hospitals Begins New Service for Blood Cancer Patients - Beckley, Bluefield & Lewisburg News, Weather, Sports

Patients with blood cancers have a new resource at West Virginia University Hospitals.

It's called the Myeloma and Lymphoma Service for more focused care and treatment for patients with blood cancer.

Doctors at the Mary Babb Randolph Cancer Center said this service is the first of its kind in the state, which desperately needs the help.

"West Virginia is a small state, we have a small patient population but our incident rates of myeloma and lymphoma are one of the highest in the country and our mortality rates of myeloma and lymphoma are among of the highest in the country," said Mehdi Hamadani, M.D., who will lead the new service, "so there's huge room for improvement."

Improvement in those figures starts in the lab. One of the main goals of the new service is to connect more patients to well-researched, cutting edge clinical trials, the kind that might mean breakthroughs in cancer treatment.

"If we keep treating patients with the therapies we have available, off the shelf, so called standard of care, guess what we will be doing 10 years from now. What will be the cure rate of these cancers? 40 percent still, 50 percent still," Dr. Hamadani said. "This needs to improve and the only way we'll be able to improve the care we provide to our patients and the cure rates we provide to our patients is through testing new therapies."

Hamadani said the cancer center treats 200 to 300 patients a year, and that three years ago just 40 or 50 of those patients were involved in clinical trials. By last year, that figure had risen up above 200.

Dr. Hamadani wants that to go even higher with a team of experts working to improve the lives of patients with these blood cancers.

"When you're diseased-focused, you develop expertise in special types of blood cancers," Dr. Hamadani said, "you get better at treating them, you are better at keeping up to date with clinical trial developments and you probably are better at opening clinical trials which are desperately needed for our patient population in this state."

In the next five years, Dr. Hamadani aims to develop two new clinical trials for every subtype of the diseases, create a tumor registry for the hospital to track treatments and patient outcomes, and bring many types of cancer experts together to create individualized treatment plans.