ASH: Treanda

There's more good stuff coming out of ASH than I can keep up with.

This one's about Treanda, also known as Bendamustine; it was approved a while ago as a treatment for Follicular NHL, and it has been used in Europe for a long time. Early clinical research showed that it seemed to be as effective as CHOP, but with much less toxicity.


Those results were confirmed at an ASH session, described in this article.


I think it's interesting that the article describes the Treanda/Rituxin combo as possibly replacing R-CHOP as "the standard first-line treatment for indolent and mantle cell lymphomas." It's very much up for debate whether R-CHOP is "the standard"; there are certainly plenty of other possibilities for first-line treatments. I guess R-CHOP might have longer remissions for fNHL, but it also takes away the standard treatment for transformed fNHL. As far as I know, Treanda does not work on aggressive lymphoma (or doesn't work as well as R-CHOP).


So it seems like that's the plan for Treanda: it provides one more early option -- maybe the best option other than R-CHOP -- for fNHL, allowing R-CHOP to be reserved for possible transformation.


Anyway, the numbers are pretty impressive, as you can see from the article. As effective as CHOP with less toxicity.


PatientPower has a video on this, too. Very encouraging stuff.