Cure Today Magazine

There's a nice magazine for cancer patients called Cure Today; it's one of those free magazines that you get in the oncologist's waiting room. (Lots of doctors have this kind of magazine, with informative articles and cute, positive names; the Ear doctor I recently went to had one in his waiting room called Papa Can You Hear Me?)


Anyway, the most recent issue of Cure Today has a nice piece on Non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma, called "Trying Something New: Long-Standing Treatments for NHL Have Something New to Offer." The first part of the article discusses the differences between aggressive and indolent (like Follicular NHL) lymphomas. A nice overview, I guess, if you need one. But the second half gets into treatment advances (singing the praises of Rituxin, for example), and discussing briefly some of the treatments thar are in clinical trials or other stages of development right now.


Some highlights of those treatments:


-- Ofatumumab (the proposed trade name is Arzerra), a monocolonal antibody like Rituxin; like Rituxin, it seeks out the CD-20 protein found on lymphoma cells. But this one is thought to bond more efficiently to CD-20 proteins than Rituxin does, and with less toxicity. It still hasn't been approved for NHL, but it's getting there.


-- Alemtuzumab (also known as Campath), is a monoclonal antibody that binds to cells with the CD-52 protein. It's already used for leukemia. The problem with this might be that it works too well: CD-52 proteins are found on lots of types of immune cells, not just the cancerous ones, so the drug can seriously suppress the immune system.


-- Histone Deacetyase Inhibitors, which include several drugs. These work by reactivating genes that are responsible for normal cell growth, but which have been shut off by cancer. Reactivating them will slow down the cancer's growth.



One expert says, “Right now, we’re living in the most exciting time ever in the history of cancer care. There are enormous numbers of new drugs that are beginning to emerge that offer you a chance to reduce the non-specific effects of chemotherapy and, theoretically, gain better efficacy.”


More of that targeting and personalization stuff, in other words. I've written about most of these treatments before, but it's nice to see that they're moving along steadily. Good news.