targeted therapies video

Here's link for a really nice video on targeted therapies in lymphoma. It's actually geared toward medical professionals, acting a as a tutorial so doctors know what they're talking about when a patient asks basic questions. This way, they can actually give some answers, and avoid saying things to a panicked patient like "You can ask the oncologist all of those questions" -- like my doctor did when she delivered the news to me.

Targeted therapies, of course, are treatments that focus on a particular feature of a cancer cell, allowing the treatment to affect only the cancer cells and not healthy cells nearby (the way traditional chemotherapy would work).

The video gives a basic overview of lymphoma, and of targeted therapies in general, and then looks at a few different categories of targeted therapies in lymphoma specifically. First, it looks at CD20-targeted treatments like my old pal Rituxan. Then it looks at bcl2-targeted therapies, which focus on bcl2 proteins, which regulate the natural cell death of cancer cells. Too much bcl2 keeps cells from dying. So getting rid of bcl2 will help kill off cancer cells. AB263 is the name of a treatment that may be able to do this. Still in clinical trials, but it seems very promising.

Another target is something called mTOR, which keeps an eye on some elements of growth in the cell. (This part of the video is very technical, though there's a nice visual to help you see what it means.) As with the other targets described in the video, too much mTOR is a problem, and it is ofetn present in cancer cells. Finally, the video discusses Histone Deacetylaces. While this target seems most effective in some T-cell lymphomas (Follicular is a B-cell lymphoma), the visual for this part of the video is especially cool, so I recommend watching it.

The video closes by stressing that cancer cells seem to survive through multiple pathways, so some trials are focusing in combining the different targeted therapies.

As always, this is all very hopeful. The different therapies involved certainly seem like they should make a difference, assumng the assumptions behind the science are correct.