Overview of Lymphoma Therapy

Here's a nice slideshow called Overview of Lymphoma Therapy, posted a couple of days ago, delivered a couple of weeks ago, from Dr. Anne LaCasce. It comes from Dana-Farber, via The Pan-Mass Challange, via my brother.

[Did I mention that my brother is riding in the Pan-Mass Challenge in a month or so, biking many miles to raise money for cancer research? He is still happily accepting donations for his ride....]

The presentation starts with a history of chemotherapy, then discusses radiotherapy and "newer therapies" (including Rituxan, which is not really new) and kinase inhibitors (briefly), and then gets into standard therapies for different lymphomas (including indolent lymphomas, which is where Follicular Lymphoma gets covered).

It's a lot to cover in 30 minutes; there are, by some estimates, well over 30 B-cell lymphomas, plus some more T-cell lymphomas, plus Hodgkins, so it's necessarily pretty general. I'm not sure who the audience is -- if she's really doing this in front of people, or just recorded it for readers of the Dana-Farber blog -- but she's also assuming her listeners are not experts.

I, personally, would have preferred more on the cutting-edge and future treatments, but I can't complain too much. She does mention that it's likely we'll see less chemo and more targeted treatment in the future, and spends a few minutes of novel pathways and the drugs in clinical trials; she mentions Ibrutinib, specifically -- more evidence of how excited people in the field are about it.

Overall, it's a pretty good overview for where the larger field is right now. I always like to see different perspectives on where we are, to see who is excited about what, and where people think we are going.