The recently approved drug motixafortide may help improve stem cell transplants for people with multiple myeloma. Learn more about this treatment:

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However, Dr. Schulz cautioned, this finding is not definitive because the two drugs were not tested head-to-head in a randomized trial. A randomized clinical trial comparing the drugs “would have been a better and fairer comparison,” he said, since plerixafor and motixafortide both work by blocking a chemical signal that tells stem cells to stay in the bone marrow.

Finally, Dr. Crees and his colleagues did a series of experiments looking at the different types of blood-forming stem cells mobilized by G-CSF plus placebo, motixafortide, or plerixafor.

“Not all stem cells are equal,” Dr. Schulz explained. And these experiments showed that motixafortide mobilized a higher percentage than plerixafor or placebo of the most primitive types of blood-forming stem cells, which could potentially lead to faster engraftment, he said.