Lots of Great NHL Research

I hate to ruin all of the Christmas and birthday frivolity with more of that "cancer talk," but....


.....but at least it's good cancer talk.


A couple of weeks ago, the ASH Conference took place. ASH stands for the American Society for Hematology. Hematology is the study of blood disorders. I figured you'd want to know, since I didn't know what it was until I was diagnosed with a blood cancer.


Hematology covers a pretty wide range of blood disorders, but there were a whole bunch of lymphoma-related research reports that came out of the conference. Lots of good, promising research, in various stages. I'll give you some brief summaries.


One research report discussed the results of an early trial for a drug called Blinatumomab, which is classified as a BiTE antibody. I wrote about BiTE antibodies before: the antibody attaches to cancerous B cells with one end of the molecule, while the other end attracts and attaches to a T cell, the kind of cell that can kill a B cell. Rituxin works well, but doesn't seem to always get all of the B cells it's looking for. Researchers think this might be a way to improve it. This was a small, phase I study, meant to figure out which dosage level of the drug would work best. Looks like they figured it out. They're moving on to a larger study, but it looks very promising.


Another panel of researchers discussed results of Rituxin Maintenance. It's a European study, so they use the European name MabThera instead of Rituxin. (I won't get into what Rituxin is -- if you've been reading the blog for a while, you know by now.) Basically, Rituxin Maintenance is the practice of giving Rituxin to a patient after he or she has received chemotherapy. It's been found that R-Maintanence prolongs the effects of chemo by continuing to fight off the lymphoma cells that were weakened by the chemo. This presentation showed that the R-Maintenance was pretty successful. It's a fairly common practice now, but this is more proof to continue it.


Another study looked at substituting one particular drug for another during a common chemotherapy regimen; the new combo has fewer side effects. The study took out Fludarabine from the regimen and replaced it with a drug called Pentostatin. Both drugs do the same job -- disrupting the lymphoma cells' ability to reproduce themselves. However, Fludarabine can sometimes lead to a condition called Myelosuppression, which means the body makes fewer blood cells. This can lead to all kinds of problems, as you can imagine, depending on which type of blood cell is being suppressed. The Pentostatin seems to be as effective as the Fludarabine, but without the Myelosuppression problems. Another very promising study, and relevent for me, because the Fludarabine combo was one of the chemotherapies that my oncologist and I have discussed for down the road.


Another study (sorry -- the link has expired now) looked at my old pal Zevalin. It was a follow-up on a presentation from last year's ASH conference. It showed, once again, some excellent news concerning Zevalin, a drug which seeks out individual lymphoma cells in the blood and zaps them with radiation. In this study, Zevalin was given after a standard chemotherapy treatment, and was found to extend the effectiveness of the chemo by over 5 years in a large percentage of patients. The authors point out that many study participants have moved beyond 5 years, so they still need to follow up with a revised number to show its continued effectiveness. In other words, next year they may tell us it's been six years of remission. Excellent news.


One more report without a link. This study looked at Treanda, the trade name for a chemo drug called bendamustine, which I've also written about before. Treanda was given to 462 patients. While it was a "single arm" trial, which means it wasn't explicitly comparing two treatments to one another within the same study, the Treanda study did seem to be as effective as CHOP, a common chemotherapy for follicular NHL. More importantly, it delivered the results with much less toxicity: about 91% of CHOP patients lose their hair, but none of the Treanda patients did. The hair loss in and of itself isn't really the issue -- that's what they're using as the measure of how toxic the chemo is on the body. As always, more long-term follow-up will be necessary, but this too looks very promising.


There are several more research reports coming out of ASH that deal with fNHL, and tons more that deal with other types of NHL, but I think this is plenty. You get the point -- there are more and better treatments for fNHL being developed all the time. Even if none proves curative, they give me more options, which is fantastic news to an fNHL patient.