I am very passionate about everything I do in life, personally and professionally. As a multiple myeloma clinician and researcher, this passion helps me through each week as I accompany my patients through their highs and lows. The same passion always leaves me asking “what more can I do.” About a year ago, my family and I had just returned from vacation. We were lounging out in the living room, it was the last weekend of the year before 2017 rang in. I came across an email from the MMRF for ‘Moving Mountains for Multiple Myeloma’ and their fundraising initiatives. Before I had finished reading the email completely, my mind was made up to sign up for the MM4MM Everest Base Camp (EBC) trek. My wife acquiesced with measured skepticism about my ability to follow through given the already taxing work schedule in a two-physician family with three kids in tow. But we have made it work! With less than four weeks to go for our trip to EBC, it has been a fun journey preparing for the trek, raising the monies and making many new friends.

The MMRF has done a great service to the field by bringing the multiple myeloma research community together on a platform that enables pivotal collaborations and innovations that will eventually lead to a cure multiple myeloma. Since its inception, the MMRF has enabled the multiple myeloma research community to make key discoveries about disease biology and helped fund pivotal trials that have quadrupled the survival of multiple myeloma patients. My mentor Dr. Bart Barlogie embarked on his academic career three decades with that goal in mind, in a time where talking about curing a “disease of the elderly” was considered heresy. In the year 2018, the multiple myeloma research community can openly talk about curing the disease — the MMRF has played a major role in making it happen. I feel privileged that the efforts of my team are a small part of that story.