A quickie for the end of the month:
The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence in the UK has approved R-Squared for some patients with Follicular Lymphoma.
R-Squared is the common name for the combination of Rituxan and Revlimid (also known as Lenalidomide). Patients must have already been treated, and the treatment stopped working. It was approved in the U.S.A. last year for that group of patients.
As I have written about before, R-Squared is one of those treatments that has gotten lymphoma specialists very excited for many years. In a direct comparison with traditional chemo, R-Squared was just as effective, with different (not necessarily fewer or worse) side effects. It's the first real alternative to chemotherapy approved in the US or the UK for Follicular Lymphoma.
I confess that I don't know the approval system in the UK (or any other country) as I do in the U.S.A., so I can't say for sure which areas are covered by NICE (just England? The whole UK?). Another article about the approval says that it will benefit 900 patients, which doesn't seem like a lot to me (but, again, I'm used to bigger numbers in my larger company).
But if that's the case, then it's actually very cool that the hard work of the approval process was completed even if it's going to help a relatively small number of people. I'm all for anything that helps any number of Follicular Lymphoma.
More good news. I'm happy to be able to share it.
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2 comments:
I had heard the protocol for R2 is 12 months
I think that is correct. Not in either of the articles I linked, but I do remember seeing it elsewhere. I think it's the same in the U.S.A. -- 12 cycles of 28 days, with the lenalidomide taken on days 1 through 21. So a little less than a year.
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