Clonal Hematopoiesis Prevalence Increases throughout Treatment of Newly Diagnosed Multiple Myeloma Patients

Background: Recent studies have identified clinical and genomic factors contributing to worse clinical outcomes in patients with multiple myeloma (MM). Clonal hematopoiesis (CH) reflects the presence of somatic driver mutations in the blood or marrow of otherwise asymptomatic individuals. Using a variant allele frequency (VAF) cutoff of 2%, we recently reported CH in 21.6% of MM patients at the time of autologous stem cell transplant (ASCT) and found it was associated with shorter overall survival (OS) and progression-free survival (PFS) in those who did not receive maintenance therapy with an immunomodulatory drug (IMiD). However, this finding was based on a single tertiary center and only included MM patients who received ASCT.