The Jerome Lipper Center for Multiple Myeloma

The Jerome Lipper Center for Multiple Myeloma provides comprehensive, state-of-the-art care, including promising new therapies through clinical trials, to patients with multiple myeloma. In addition, the center conducts an active program of basic and clinical research aimed at improving the outcomes of patients with multiple myeloma.

The Lipper Center and LeBow Institute for Myeloma Therapeutics encompass a large, international team of laboratory-based and clinical investigators who are striving to find more effective therapies for multiple myeloma and someday a cure. At any given time, dozens of studies and clinical trials are under way.

Our Services

The Lipper Center provides a comprehensive range of services for patients with multiple myeloma. These include:

• consultation and confirmation of diagnosis;
• development of a personalized treatment plan offering the latest therapies (combination chemotherapy, novel biologically-based therapies, radiation therapy);
• access to clinical trials involving novel therapies (Phase I/II/III studies);
• stem cell transplantation;
• access to supportive and complementary therapies; and
• collaboration with patients local physician, including for follow-up care closer to home.

Clinical Research

The center's research in the laboratory and the clinic is focused on several areas. These include investigations of the genetic abnormalities of myeloma cells; studies of the complex signaling that enables myeloma cells to grow and resist both conventional chemotherapy and novel therapy; efforts to unleash the power of the immune system against myeloma; and explorations of the way in which myeloma cells interact with their environment in the bone marrow and outside the marrow compartment. The mission of this research is to identify and validate novel targets in myeloma, so that new therapies aimed at these targets can be developed, leading to improved outcomes and a cure.

The center offers patients access to a wide range of clinical research trials. These include studies aimed at improving the outcomes of patients undergoing high-dose chemotherapy and stem cell transplantation, as well as trials using agents like thalidomide and its immunomodulatory derivatives, proteasome inhibitors, that attempt to kill myeloma cells directly and also make it impossible for them to grow in the marrow "neighborhood." The center also has clinical research trials evaluating supportive therapies, such as bisphosphonates.

• See a selection of clinical trials for multiple myeloma at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute (PDF)
• Search databases of all clinical trials at Dana-Farber and nationally

The goal of the research program is to quickly take discoveries made in the laboratory into the clinic where they can benefit patients.