Myeloma May Be Curable for Some. Experts Are Working to Arrive at a Definition for Cure.
September 24, 2026 — At the 23rd International Myeloma Society Annual Meeting & Exposition, international experts are working toward criteria that could identify when a patient’s remission is durable enough to be called a cure.
Myeloma has always been incurable, as the vast majority of patients relapse after initial therapy and have shorter life expectancy. However, due to outstanding advances in the field, this is changing. The 23rd Annual Meeting of the IMS in Glasgow, Scotland, is being held now. At this meeting, leading experts, including members of the IMF’s International Myeloma Working Group (IMWG), proposed a working definition of cure. A shared standard could help researchers determine which patients have sustainable remission without treatment and how to measure progress toward making cure possible for more people.
The shift reflects years of progress in immunotherapy, combination treatments, earlier intervention, and increasingly sensitive disease monitoring. In recent years, myeloma practitioners are seeing their patients reach “deep, lasting remissions, including some who remain disease-free and off therapy for many years. Major advances in immunotherapy, combination treatments, early intervention, and sensitive techniques for disease monitoring have shifted the field from asking whether myeloma can be controlled to defining what cure actually means,” as explained in this IMS media brief.
The evidence is promising, but it does not yet establish how many patients are cured or how long they must remain disease-free. The IMS media brief adds, “Myeloma remains incurable for most patients. Relapse is still common. High-risk and ultra-high-risk disease continue to resist even the most intensive therapies.”
Long-term results from the CARTITUDE-1 trial have sharpened that question. The study evaluated ciltacabtagene autoleucel (cilta-cel), a B-cell maturation antigen (BCMA)-directed chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapy, in people with relapsed or refractory multiple myeloma.
In a September 2025 ASCO Post, IMF Chair of the Board Dr. S. Vincent Rajkumar of Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, shared: “in one center where serial measurable residual disease (MRD) studies were done, all 12 patients who were progression-free for at least 5 years also achieved MRD negativity at 10-6 level and had no evidence of active disease on positron-emission tomography/computed tomography assessments. This opens the possibility that some patients in this cohort may be potentially cured, which is quite remarkable given that the trial participants had been heavily pretreated. However, we need more follow-up to determine whether there is a sustained plateau in the time to disease progression and/or the progression-free survival curve to establish curability and to determine the proportion of patients who can be cured.”
A Proposed Definition of Cure
At the IMS meeting, myeloma researchers and experts are considering the following proposed criteria for defining cure in multiple myeloma:
- A myeloma patient could be newly diagnosed or have relapsed myeloma
- A myeloma patient should be in sustained Complete Remission (CR) by standard criteria.
- The patient has achieved minimal residual disease (MRD) is at 10-6sensitivity, as assessed by either next-generation sequencing (NGS) or next-generation flow (NGF)
- The MRD-negativity is sustained for 5 years without any therapy. This is irrespective of previous sustained MRD-negativity on therapy.
- There should be at least 4 MRD assessments in 5 years, with the last one being at 5 years; additionally, all negative and no positive tests in between, if performed.
- Negative by functional imaging (PET/CT or Diffusion-Weighted MRI, Whole-Body MRI)
- At least at the beginning of a five-year period, and at the end of the five-year period with no intervening positivity, if performed.
These proposed criteria require sustained MRD-negativity at a sensitivity of 10-6 for five years without therapy, repeated MRD tests, and negative functional imaging at the beginning and end of that period. The rigor reflects the central challenge: a deep response during treatment is not the same as a lasting remission after treatment ends.
The hope of this 2026 IMS meeting is to build consensus guidelines that help experts use these tools in the future to determine which patients can safely be called cured.
A clear standard would help doctors and researchers:
- identify lasting remission without treatment and
- develop a way to measure the work needed to help more patients achieve such a remission.