Patient Power on ASH

OK, I have a confession to make: I've been unfaithful.

I was doing so well with posts this month, and now I'm seeing that I have only posted once in the last 10 days.

And it's because I've been busy with another aspect of my online life. It's been pulling me away from Lympho Bob. As much as I love reading and writing about cancer (really, who wouldn't?), it's new and fun and exciting and taking my time. All that has slowed down a little bit for now, so maybe I can go back and read and write about all the stuff I have saved that deals with Follicular Lymphoma.

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So here goes:

The good folks at Patient Power have been posting their annual follow-ups to the ASH Conference. Not much (at least not yet) on Follicular Lymphoma, though this short interview with Dr. Ajay Gopal of the Seattle Cancer Care Alliance does mention FL, and results from research on Idelalisib/Zydelig. It's a brief mention, but nice to hear. (Sounds like CLL and Hodgkin's are the big winners at ASH this year.)

While I was at Patient Power, I did a little searching around, and I found an interview about the ASH Conference in 2007 with Dr. Mark Kirschbaum of the City of Hope National Medical Center.

What was so interesting to me was that this interview happened about a month before I was diagnosed.

Dr. Kirschbaum discusses a clinical trial for an inhibitor  that had good results. He was very interested in alternatives to standard chemotherapy, especially epigenetic agents that target processes that cancer cells rely on, rather than chemos that kill the cells. He didn't name the particular treatment, but looking at the the ASH abstracts, it seems to me that he was probably talking about Vorinostat (also known as Zolinza!).

Vorinostat/Zolinza! was in a phase 2 clinical trial in 2007, and seemed to have pretty good results.

Last March, I wrote about Vorinostat/Zolinza! being in a phase 2 clinical trial.

Eight years, and it seems like we haven't made any progress there. (But I'm sure if looked into more deeply, I'd find out why.)

It's a nice reminder that, as excited as I get about new research that I come across, it takes a long time for a treatment to get from a lab to the oncologist's office. We've come a long way in the time since I've been diagnosed, but there's plenty of work that's been done that hasn't gone anywhere -- not even to the phase 2 clinical trial that Vorinostat/Zolinza! has seen.

(Zolinda! doesn't officially have an exclamation point at the end of it, but as I wrote in March, it really should.)

Anyway, this little trip through history isn't going to stop me from getting excited, and it shouldn't stop you from getting exciting, either. There's still plenty of great stuff out there. And I'm going to keep writing about it.