ASH Abstracts 2014!

It's Blood Cancer Christmas Time again!

OK, that's a little sick, but when I see that the abstracts for the annual conference for the American Society of Hematology are available, I feel like a little kid on Christmas morning. The ASH conference is where some of the more cutting-edge research on blood cancers is presented every year. It's not necessarily research that can be put into practice immediately. In fact, it's more likely to be the first time that promising research gets presented to other experts in the field. But it's also at a stage where researchers are excited about sharing it with the world. So even if it isn't a big ol' stuffed Teddy Bear under the Cancer Christmas Tree, it's certainly a letter to Santa with all of the things we hope we'll get this year.

You can find the abstracts related to Follicular Lymphoma here. There are 191 of them, which is more than last year.

I've only done a quick scan of them, but it looks like maybe a few new focused treatments are being tested, there's some further testing of some established treatments, and a few surprises here and there. My plan is to look at and comment on some of these over the next few weeks -- the ones that excite me most.

I'll say it now, and say it again as I review things -- a lot of the stuff presented at ASH is in very early stages. It's stuff to keep an eye on for the (hopefully near) future, not necessarily stuff to ask your oncologist about when the subject of your next treatment comes up. But we can be hopeful,and excited about it anyway.

Stay tuned.