Antonio Palumbo, MD, from the University of Turin, Turin, Italy, provides an overview of his talk on ‘Perspectives on future paths to cure’ held at the Myeloma 2016 meeting in Boston, MA. According to Dr Palumobo, the key message is that the survival of patients with multiple myeloma (MM) has improved over the last 15 years. Dr Palumbo further discusses the prospect of being able to cure a proportion of patients and further highlights that currently, the use of a dose intense treatment at diagnosis is important as with this approach, remission durations of around six or even ten years are achievable.