# International Myeloma Working Group consensus criteria for response and minimal residual disease assessment in multiple myeloma

Source: https://onco.cc/key-papers/paper-kumar-lancet-oncol/  
OnCo record `paper-kumar-lancet-oncol` (Key paper). Data CC BY-NC 4.0, attribute "Data from OnCo (onco.cc)"; commercial use needs a licence.

## TL;DR

Paper cited by one term page, indexed on Europe PMC as PubMed record 27511158 and published in The Lancet Oncology; the citing page links this DOI, which is how the record was matched.

## Summary

Treatment of multiple myeloma has substantially changed over the past decade with the introduction of several classes of new effective drugs that have greatly improved the rates and depth of response. Response criteria in multiple myeloma were developed to use serum and urine assessment of monoclonal proteins and bone marrow assessment (which is relatively insensitive). Given the high rates of complete response seen in patients with multiple myeloma with new treatment approaches, new response categories need to be defined that can identify responses that are deeper than those conventionally defined as complete response. Recent attempts have focused on the identification of residual tumour cells in the bone marrow using flow cytometry or gene sequencing. Furthermore, sensitive imaging techniques can be used to detect the presence of residual disease outside of the bone marrow. Combining these new methods, the International Myeloma Working Group has defined new response categories of minimal residual disease negativity, with or without imaging-based absence of extramedullary disease, to allow uniform reporting within and outside clinical trials. In this Review, we clarify several aspects of disease response assessment, along with endpoints for clinical trials, and highlight future directions for disease response assessments.

Indexed on Europe PMC as PubMed record 27511158 (DOI 10.1016/s1470-2045(16)30206-6). Matched by DOI alone: one term page cites this DOI among its external links (the pages are listed under Related), and this page was written so that the citation resolves inside OnCo. No figure has been checked by an editor.

## Fields

- Kind: Key paper
- Last checked: 2026-09-22
- Tags: europepmc-ingest
- Journal: The Lancet Oncology
- Year: 2016
- DOI: 10.1016/s1470-2045(16)30206-6
- Authors: Kumar S, Paiva B, Anderson KC, et al.
- What it means: One term page on OnCo cites this paper by its DOI; this record gives the citation a page of its own so a reader can follow it without leaving OnCo. Read the abstract above alongside the citing page listed under Related; the record was created automatically from the Europe PMC entry and its figures have not been checked by hand.
- Caveats: Matched to the citing OnCo records by DOI alone; the summary reproduces the Europe PMC abstract and no figure has been verified against the full paper.

## Sources

- Lancet Oncol 2016: https://doi.org/10.1016/s1470-2045(16)30206-6
- PubMed: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27511158/
- Europe PMC: https://europepmc.org/article/MED/27511158

## Connected records

- terms: [MRD negativity (myeloma, 10⁻⁵ / 10⁻⁶)](https://onco.cc/terms/mrd-negativity-myeloma/)
- journals: [The Lancet Oncology](https://onco.cc/journals/lancet-oncology/)

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