ASH: Give it a Shot

More from the ASH conference: Cutting down times for administering Rituxan.

I wrote about something similar about a month ago: the FDA had approved a speedy infusion for certain patients receiving Rituxan, cutting the time in half, and (according to one study) potentially saving millions of dollars.

Even better news out of England, reported at ASH: patients can be given Rituxan as a single shot, just like you'd get a flu shot. The study claims this cuts down infusion times from 2 hours to 5 minutes. They're good in England -- mine took a minimum of 4 hours.

As this report says, cutting down all of that infusion time saves a whole bunch of money for the National Health Service; I imagine similar savings could be realized in the U.S., not to mention all the time and emotional distress that goes with sitting around for 4 hours.

The actual ASH abstract shows that this is all a little more complicated than the above link would indicate (which is often the case when we're dealing with popular press reports of medical issues). The ASH study used the subcutaneous Rituxan in combination with CHOP or CVP chemotherapy, and in R maintenance following the chemo, and found that that results were comparable to traditional IV administration of Rituxan.  That's all still very significant, of course, but it's not the same as single-agent Rituxan (which is what I had). But this study does seem to establish that their subcutaneous Rituxan is about the same as IV Rituxan, no matter how and when it is administered.

And, of course, this will take a while to become standard practice in the U.S. This study is reported as "stage 1," with additional patients being recruited for "stage 2" of the study. I don't know if their system for approval is comparable to ours, which means a stage 3 would be necessary before things get approved. We haven't even started thinking about this in the U.S., as far as I know. It's from an international team of researchers, but none is from the U.S.

Still, as always, it gives us hope.