ASH Conference

This year's American Society of Hematology (ASH) conference is coming up; it will take place in Atlanta, December 8-11. It's a big deal for blood cancer research. It's kind of a first step: researchers can present their early results to other hematologists, and get some excitement going. It's not usually for a while that we see final results, published in peer reviewed journals (that is, vetted and approved by other hematologists as being valid research).

In the next few weeks, we'll start to see press releases from universities and drug companies with excited descriptions of research. But it's important to remember that it's early research.

Now, I'm not immune to the excitement. Look back and you'll see me describing stuff that looks very promising. Some of that stuff has proven to be worth the excitement; some of it just kind of dies off and we never hear about it again.

That said, I will not give up on hope. I'll take the excitement any day.

According to the wonderful folks at Patients Against Lymphoma (at Lymphomation.org -- still the best site to go to if you want to start learning about lymphoma), there are 126 presentations about Follicular Lymphoma being presented at ASH this year, and PAL lists them all. I plan to look at most of them, and comment on the ones that I think seem worth getting hopeful about.

Doesn't that sound like fun? Stay tuned.....