Two Nice Cancer Links

I talked to my mom on the phone last night, and she hinted that I wasn't posting as often as I had been (or apparently should be), so I'll give you a quickie today.

(Geez, Mom. It's my busy time of year. Plus, I'm still sluggish from you stuffing me with manicotti two weeks ago. Take it easy, huh?)

Two cancer-related (though not specificaly lymphoma-related) items:

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First, an interesting interactive site from the Abramson Cancer Center at UPenn called the OncoLife Survivorship Care Plan. The creators of the site say that they understand that after cancer survivors have been treated successfully, they should have a "care plan" -- something that lets the patient know about the kinds of psychological, physical, relationship, and financial effects they are likely to experience, as well as information about healthy lifestyle changes, genetic counseling, and relapse prevention. The problem, the developers say, is that as important as such a plan is, it is time-consuming to create for each individual patient.

The OncoLife Survivorship Care Plan allows patients to put in some information about their tretaments, and have a Care Plan generated for them. This is then shared with the oncologist and other members of the medical team, and refined as necessary.

Seems like a very useful thing. I'm sure there are oncologists who don't have the time to create such a plan, or who overlook certain things that should be included, and this will be a big help to them. But I also see it as a big help to patients. Sometimes, we just don't know what kinds of questions to ask, and having that plan gives us more to think about.

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Second, a piece about Personalized Cancer Treatments. I've been writing about this topic for a couple of months -- the idea that cancer research is heading toward "personalization." That is, we now know enough about how individuals react to treatments on a cellular level that we can test to see if a treatment is working (or even if it will work before it's ever given to the patient). The idea is to save the time, expense, and pain of a treatment if we know it's going to fail. But having this kind of information might ultimately mean that reserachers can create new treatments based on how they see an individual body react.

For me, what's so exciting about this piece is that it shows how quickly this type of research is moving along. I posted a video about three months ago that showed three NHL researchers discussing current treatments and trends, and they agreed that in 5 to 10 years, this kind of personalization research will be the most exciting thing happening in the lymphoma community. I don't think we'll be doing this kind of personalization testing in the extremely near future, but it makes me think that 5 years, and not 10, is a realistic goal. That's pretty exciting.

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That second piece comes from a report given at the American Association for Cancer Research conference, which has been going on in Denver for a few days. I've been gathering up some other reports from AACR that deal more specifically with NHL, so I'll share those within the next few days.