Meeting report of the 4th Heidelberg Myeloma Workshop: Current status and developments in diagnosis and therapy of multiple myeloma

Excerpt

On April 26/27, 2013, the 4th Heidelberg Myeloma Workshop took place in the lecture hall of the Department of Internal Medicine of the University Hospital of Heidelberg, Germany. The main topics of the meeting were on Friday: (1) genomic understanding of the disease (Gareth Morgan, London, Great Britain; Richard Houlston, London, Great Britain; Dirk Hose, Heidelberg, Germany; Kari Hemminki, Heidelberg, Germany), (2) development of myeloma from precursor disease (Maria Victoria Mateos, Salamanca, Spain), (3) novel imaging techniques (Stefan Delorme, Heidelberg, Germany), (4) recent developments in therapeutic strategies including treatment for myeloma bone disease (Paul Richardson, Boston, USA; Philippe Moreau, Nantes, France; Sundar Jagannath, New York, USA; Hartmut Goldschmidt, Heidelberg, Germany). Finally, a debate of Nicolaus Kroeger (Hamburg, Germany) and Morie Gertz (Rochester, United States) highlighted the current discussion on whether the aim of myeloma therapy should be to cure a proportion of patients or to rather treat this malignancy like a chronic disease. …