Newsletter - What's the Deal with Curcumin?

Dear Friends,

Welcome to our first newsletter of 2018! We've already hit one milestone - having enrolled our 250th participant last week. Our team is growing - this month we are joined by a team of electrical engineering students from the University of Washington who are doing their senior Capstone projects with All4Cure.   And our Crowd Funding campaign on Indiegogo will be launching soon. In this newsletter we’ll give you Tony's take on a report suggesting that the natural product curcumin may be helpful in some patients with myeloma, you will meet Dr. Ken Anderson, Professor at Harvard and clinician participating in All4Cure, and you can see links to an interview with Tony and a recent cool paper published this week by Tony and colleagues from the University of Washington.

Topic #4: What's the Deal with Curcumin?

A number of people have asked me for my thoughts about a paper that is of natural interest (no pun intended!) to many myeloma patients: “Long-term stabilization of myeloma with curcumin” (Zaidi A, Lai M, Cavenagh J. BMJ Case Rep). You can access the paper for free here: http://casereports.bmj.com/content/2017/bcr-2016-218148.full.pdf.

Curcumin is an inexpensive, natural product that has been evaluated for the prevention of and treatment of cancer, including myeloma, for many years. This paper describes a patient with myeloma who responded to cyclophosphamide, dexamethasone and thalidomide, but wasn’t able to continue treatment due to low white blood cell counts.  She therefore apparently stopped all myeloma drugs more than 5 years ago, and instead has used curcumin plus a few other things. Using information from the paper, we put together a rough draft of an All4Cure graph that describes this patient.

While this graph isn't completely accurate because information provided in the paper is incomplete, it’s probably accurate enough to make the following conclusions: 1. It does seem remarkable that this patient has done well despite discontinuing all myeloma drugs more than 5 years ago (note that this is an assumption, since the paper is not explicit on this point). 2. The patient has been doing more than just taking Curcumin.  She has also been taking a Bioperine, which is given to aid in the absorption of Curcumin, and she has been receiving weekly hyperbaric oxygen treatments. Therefore the title of this article should have been: “Long-term stabilization of myeloma with curcumin, bioperine, and hyperbaric oxygen.”  As a side note, I think that it is equally plausible that the hyperbaric oxygen was responsible for this effect. 3. I find it troubling that so little information about this patient is provided in the paper.   Almost any of the >80 patients currently enrolled in All4Cure have much more data about themselves than was given in this paper.   With so much interest in this question, the authors should have been much more thorough in their description of what happened to this patient.

Even though a small randomized, placebo controlled trial of curcumin in patients with MGUS and smoldering myeloma was negative (http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ajh.23204/epdf), I am an evangelist for the concept that treatments that work well for some patients may not work at all for other patients.   Therefore, do I think that Curcumin may have been effective in this patient?  Absolutely! Would I rely on Curcumin for my own myeloma treatment? Absolutely Not!

But that is what All4Cure is all about. Imagine dashboards that track the courses of thousands of patients with myeloma.  Imagine being able to focus in on those patients who have decided to take Curcumin.  Through All4Cure’s transparent platform we can all see how they fare compared to patients who don’t take Curcumin.  For patients who seem to respond to Curcumin, we can look for common features – for example does Curcumin seem to be working in conjunction with other natural products? Does Curcumin from some manufacturers seem to work better than from other manufacturers?  Does Curcumin seem to work for some types of myeloma better than other types of myeloma?  By patients joining together we can shed light on these and other decades-old questions.

Watch Tony's Interview with Andrew Schorr of Patient Power, talking about the Power of All4Cure’s Knowledge Sharing Platform

Meet One of Our Participating Clinicians: Dr. Kenneth Anderson, Kraft Family Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.

Q: Tell us a little bit about your background!

A: I grew up in a small town and wanted to be a general practitioner until I met my mentor Dr. Richard Humphrey at Johns Hopkins, a myeloma doctor who taught me two lessons: make science count for patients, and treat patients as family.  Over the intervening nearly four decades, I have been privileged to follow those lessons and developed laboratory and animal models of myeloma in the bone marrow microenvironment, which have allowed for identification of novel targets and validation of targeted therapies to inhibit myeloma cell growth and/or trigger its death.  My academic team has then helped to rapidly translate multiple agents (proteasome inhibitors, immunomodulatory drugs, monoclonal antibodies, and histone deacetylase inhibitors) from the bench to the bedside and clinical trials leading to FDA approval.  At the same time, I have been blessed to help train multiple researchers and caregivers from around the world at our Center, affectionately named the "United Nations Against Myeloma". These trainees are now the leaders in myeloma research and care internationally and life long collaborators and cherished personal friends.  Most importantly, patients have always been my heroes and the inspiration for all that I do, and there is no greater personal reward than helping to give the gift of hope and life to patients and their families. Finally, I am most grateful for my loving wife Cynthia and children Emily, David, and Peter, without whom I could not have pursued my life-long dream for a world someday without myeloma!

Q: How can All4Cure be helpful to clinicians and researchers? 

A: All4Cure provides an amazing innovative resource to patients and caregivers to assure that they can receive the most current promising therapies, taking into consideration the features of their individual myeloma characteristics. It is a highly innovative and unique resource. There have been many and rapid advances in our understanding and therapy of myeloma, and this rapid pace of progress continues.   Most importantly, All4Cure allows for sharing of the most up-to-date and current data among myeloma specialists, and assures that each and every patient can benefit from cutting-edge knowledge and the experience of international myeloma experts to assure optimal individualized patient care. 

At last, please check out this new paper from Nature Communications by Tony and his collaborators at the University of Washington! 

We LOVE having you as part of the All4Cure Team!

Tony and your Friends at All4CureQuestions or concerns?

Please direct them to Tony Blau at tony@all4cure.com