More Personal

A timely follow-up to the last post on Personalized Oncology:

Cornell's Lymphoma Department has a blog called "New Developments in Lymphoma," which I have linked to in the past. Their lymphoma experts take turns explaining recent research on lymphoma, usually very clearly. It's a nice blog.

Monday's post is called "Lymphoma in the News: Two Important Studies Take Us One Step Closer to Personalized Lymphoma Therapy." As the title indicates, it describes two recent studies that move us toward the kind of personalization that were talked about in the podcast I linked to on Sunday.

As I said, the Cornell blog does a pretty good job of explaining things in clear terms, so I won't get too much into the content. But I will give a brief summary:


Diffuse Large B-Cell Lymphoma (DLBCL) is the most common aggressive NHL. The standard of care for DLBCL is R-CHOP, which often works, but not always. New research shows us that DLBCL is actually a three different lymphomas (or sub-types of DLBCL). There's some speculation that once the sub-type is identified, it might be easier to target different treatments that would be more effective. This is, of course, the essence of personalized oncology.

The first study they look at is described as "groundbreaking": It discusses the sequencing of the genes of lymphoma cells and compares them to patients' normal cells. Doing so identifies 109 potential mutations that result in lymphoma. The second study also identifies mutations, finding 26 that had never before been associated with cancer.

The practical benefits of these studies are a ways off; nobody has any treatments that were just waiting for the right genetic mutation, or anything like that. But, as the blog post states, the studies do show how quickly we are using information from the Human Genome Project to identify possible causes of difficulties. Knowing those causes should make it easier to create targeted treatments -- hopefully in the not-too-distant future.