Targeted Cancer Drugs Keep Myeloma Patients Up And Running

on Wright got diagnosed with multiple myeloma at what turned out to be the right time. It was 10 years ago, when he was 62.

That was at the beginning of a revolution in treating this once-fearsome blood cell cancer, which strikes around 20,000 Americans every year. The malignancy can literally eat holes in victims' bones, which can snap from the simple act of bending over to pick up a package.

The first treatment Wright had was thalidomide, the sedative that caused awful birth defects in the 1960s. But it didn't work for long.

Then he got into a study of a related drug called pomalidomide. Earlier this month the Food and Drug Administration approved the drug, which will be marketed as Pomalyst.

Don Wright was diagnosed with multiple myeloma in 2003 only days after completing his first marathon. Since then he has run 70 marathons in all 50 states.

Not only has the drug kept the Minnesota man alive far beyond the three or four years typical for newly diagnosed myeloma patients not so long ago. But it's also enabled him to keep running marathons.

In the decade since his diagnosis, Wright has averaged seven marathons a year. He's training for his 71st, which will take place in March on Cape Cod.

"Yesterday I ran 18 miles inside of a soccer dome," Wright said recently, "and then came back and shoveled snow for 2 1/2 hours. That was a big day."

Wright was one of the first patients to get Pomalyst, back in 2006. "For me this has been a miracle drug," he tells Shots. "It's kept the myeloma stable. And it's just a little pill."

Pomalyst is the latest of a half-dozen myeloma drugs developed in the decade or so since Wright got diagnosed. Another, called Kyprolis, won FDA approval last summer.

Like many so-called "targeted" cancer therapies coming out these days, the new drugs are enormously expensive. Pomalyst will cost about $10,450 a month, or more than $125,000 a year.