Myeloma UK 2026 grant call: Prof Graham Jackson on the critical questions facing myeloma research

As myeloma treatment options evolve and survival improves, the complexity of the patient pathway grows. Optimising treatment, treatment tolerance, and fully understanding the consequences and impact of those treatments, has never been more important. That’s why Myeloma UK’s current grant call – up to £1 million over 5 years – will support research in this area. Our Chief Clinical and Scientific Advisor, Professor Graham Jackson, reflects on why now is the moment to push this research frontier forward.

Optimising treatment, tolerance and consequences: A clinical priority

The key reason behind this grant call is to find solutions that allow people to live longer and live well with myeloma. That’s our route towards a functional cure – where people live with myeloma but the condition is kept under control, with minimal treatment and little impact on everyday life.

Supporting people with myeloma starts with understanding treatment tolerance, the side effects, consequences, and optimising treatment. This is all about helping people with myeloma live better.

We increasingly recognise that continuous treatment brings a significant burden to people living with myeloma. We hear regularly from patients about ongoing treatment burden and longer-term side effects. That’s why this grant call is so promising. It offers the opportunity to explore how patients tolerate therapy, how we assess side effects, whether there are different susceptibilities to side effects, or the reasons that some people become resistant to treatment.

Of course, one of the positive consequences of treatments improving in recent years is that people are doing well and living longer. But this means that many people, who are on treatment until progression, are likely to be taking that treatment for a long period of time.

We need to recognise the challenges this can bring – these patients are getting side effects that affect quality of life. Could we explore stopping treatment for those who have had a very good response? To do this we need innovation: we need kinder ways to assess minimal residual disease to inform treatment plans that don’t involve bone marrow biopsies.

Addressing the unmet need in myeloma treatment

There are still substantial gaps in our real-world understanding of how people experience and respond to myeloma treatment. Some of these gaps relate to the longer-term consequences of treatment. For example, we still need to understand how best to assess patients from a cardiac perspective before starting treatment, and how cardiac morbidity evolves over time. Cognitive effects are another overlooked area: memory issues associated with immunomodulatory drugs (IMiDs) are widely recognised in clinics, yet this has never been studied in any meaningful detail. 

We need to understand treatment sequencing better. Although we have a number of options at first, second and third line, patients arrive at these stages at very different time points, with very different treatment histories. This variation raises important questions about how clinicians should sequence treatments and whether stronger evidence could better guide pathways.

Right now, clinical trials often enrol patients only with good performance status – people who, despite myeloma, are fit and have few or no comorbidities. But that’s not real life for many people and so we lack evidence around optimising treatment for those less fit. We still have questions that drug company studies are not in a position to answer – but perhaps we could.

These things represent only a fraction of the issues both patients and clinicians encounter daily. There are so many possibilities that we could look at solving together.

Help us solve the treatment challenges that matter most to patients

We have seen incredible steps in treatment for myeloma over the years and people are living so much longer. But to take the next steps towards a functional cure, we need to refine treatment optimisation, tolerance and consequences. We need more research to help our patients live better with the treatments that they are on – or to live well with fewer treatments.

This is an opportunity to address something that worries you or your patients.  

If you’re not sure if your idea fits the bill, contact us at research@myeloma.org.uk – we’re keen to chat it through and open to new and innovative ideas to solve a critical problem that our myeloma patients face every day.