More on Velcade

Hmmm.

Dr. R mentions a couple of possible treatments, and suddenly they're in the news a whole bunch. (Well, maybe not "suddenly" -- there's been a steady stream of stuff on Treanda for a while, and I hadn't even considered Velcade a possibility, so it might have been there anyway and I just didn't see it.)

Anyway, more on Velcade. In the July issue of Leukemia and Lymphoma, there's an article on results from a research study on Velcade that discusses how exactly it works. The article focuses on research on Mantle Cell Lymphoma, a more aggressive variety of NHL, but it may very well explain something about how it works for Follicular, too.


Velcade (also known as bortezomib) is a proteasome inhibitor. As I explained before, this proteasomes are normal parts of cells that act as recyclers. As proteins break down in a cell, the proteasomes clean them up. When Velcade inhibits this from happening, all that junk backs up and the cell dies. Velcade causes this back-up in cancer cells in particular.


That's the basics. It's a pretty complicated process, and the research described in the article gets at how this process actually works. The research identified the particular proteins that were involved in all of this -- which ones contribute to the cancer cell growing, and which ones contribute to it dying. So this is all part of that "personalized medicine" trend in cancer research that will basically result in a big catalogue of stuff to look for in an individual patients' cells, with information about what it means. (Seeing certain proteins in a cell will give a clue as to whether or not Velcade will be effective.)


Velcade, as I understand it, is the first of what will ultimately be a whole class of proteasome inhibitor drugs. I don't know what else is in development that would relevant for fNHL, but, as the press release linked above says, the research is "exciting" to a lot of folks in the cancer research world.