Gosh -- I don't know what gets me more excited about this time of year: the MLB Winter Meetings, with all of that great hot stove talk (trades, free agent signings, the whole deal), or the American Society of Hematology Conference, which also started today.
I'll let you read any baseball news on your own, unless something really good happens with the Red Sox getting some "new blood" (ha! hematology joke!), but for now I'll stick to ASH news, particularly some RadioImmunoTherapy news.
Spectrum Pharmaceuticals, which owns Zevalin, issued a press release a few days ago with the titles of sessions at ASH that involve Zevalin -- fourteen in all. I haven't read all of the abstracts, but several involve using RIT as part of stem cell transplants. From what I've heard before, some folks have been trying RIT instead of super-heavy chemo as a conditioning treatment for the transplant; the idea is the RIT would be less taxing than R-ICE or other typically used chemos. I'll have to read around and see what the RIT-SCT connection is here at ASH (don't you love all of these acronyms?).
Also: an interesting session on Zevalin after a Fludarabine-based chemo treatment for untreated fNHL patients. Very interesting to me, given my near-obsession with RIT, and Dr. R's mentioning that Fludarabine might be something he'd want to try with me, an untreated fNHL patient.
Another ASH & RIT-related link: Patient Power, a web site devoted to providing information to patients of serious illnesses of all kinds, is showing videos from ASH as part of its P2TV series. I'll show a few others in the next few days, but here's one on RIT, with one of the ASH presenters giving his perspective on what's being done in the field these days. Nothing earth-shattering, but it's a nice summary of what RIT is and how it's being used these days. (Check out those numbers he's throwing around -- worth hearing even if you've heard them before.)
I recommend browsing the Patient Power web site, not just the RIT video. Nice stuff.
More in the next few days.
1 comment:
Hi Lympho Bob,
I wholeheartedly join you in your "near-obsession" with RIT. It saved me 7 years ago after all else failed and I've been working hard to raise awareness of it ever since.
Did you also see the update on using RIT as frontline? If not, it's here:http://ash.confex.com/ash/2009/webprogram/Paper24876.html
I know two patients who were in this trial. One took RIT in 1996, the other in 1998. Both remain healthy. They are on my website under "Success Stories" if you'd like to take a look. See http://www.lymphomabook.com/SuccessStories.html. Look for Teresa Singh and Kevin Billow.
All the best,
Betsy
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