COVID-19 infection in patients with multiple myeloma: A German-Chinese experience from Wurzburg and Wuhan

ABSTRACT

Currently, experience with COVID-19 in multiple myeloma (MM) is still very limited. Terefore, we conducted this analysis of MM patients infected by COVID-19 from two prominent hematology centers in Wuhan and Wurzburg (Union Hospital of Tongji Medical College, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, China and University Hospital of Wurzburg, Wurzburg, Germany) as of 9 June 2020. In total, we identifed fve Caucasian patients from Wurzburg and three Asian patients from Wuhan. The majority of the patients were male (n=5, 63%), and the median age at COVID-19 diagnosis was 57 (range 39-83 years). Tree patients had newly diagnosed (ND) MM, and two of them were therapy naive at diagnosis of COVID-19. One patient from Wuhan was receiving the second cycle of VTD (bortezomib, thalidomide, and dexamethasone) as the first line therapy. In Wuhan, a patient with extramedullary progression (No. 6) received leukapheresis to prepare for a salvage chimeric antigen receptor T-cell (CAR-T) therapy. Due to COVID-19 infection, systemic anti-MM treatment was discontinued in all eight patients. Notably, two patients in Wurzburg showed no COVID-19 symptoms, and the other three patients exhibited only mild symptoms such as fever, cough, and nausea, which did not require an intensive care unit (ICU) admission. Tree patients did not receive any COVID-19 treatment, and all fve patients in Wurzburg recovered. In contrast, two patients from Wuhan developed severe respiratory syndrome so that mechanical ventilation and circulatory support were needed. The patient who was receiving the frontline therapy with VTD also had an elevated procalcitonin value (30.05 ng/ml), suggesting an additional bacterial infection, and this patient died due to acute respiratory failure. In addition, two out of fve patients in our cohort did not show positive IgM or IgG for COVID-19 afer recovery. In summary, our observations showed that COVID-19 infection could be severe especially in NDMM, and also suggested inadequate humoral immune response in MM patients, probably due to secondary immune defciency caused by the treatments or the disease itself. Surprisingly, the MM patients in Wurzburg did not present any signs of severe COVID-19 infection. Other than Wuhan where COVID-19 was reported for the first time, in Europe, the pandemic had already been announced, and in Germany the lock-down came relatively early in comparison to other countries.