ASH Abstracts are Here!

It's that time of year again -- the ASH conference is coming up soon, and the abstracts are now online.

ASH is the American Society of Hematology, the organization for doctors and other healthcare professionals who deal with blood diseases, including Follicular Lymphoma. Every December, they hold their annual meeting (this year, it runs December 11-14), where researchers present the results of their work. Along with the ASCO conference in the spring, it's a conference I pay close attention to -- it's often where researchers choose to reveal their biggest, happiest results. 

Unlike ASCO, ASH doesn't allow for free registration for independent cancer advocates like me. So I won't get access to a lot of the data that would be most interesting. But that's OK -- I'll do as I always do, and look at some of the abstracts (the summaries of the presentations that the researchers will make at the conference) and share some thoughts about the ones that seem most interesting. Because the abstracts are already available, I'll do some "ASH preview" posts over the next few weeks, and keep an eye out during and after the conference for any news in the Lymphoma World with some expert opinions about the conference. (Expert opinions are good. Better than Cancer Nerd opinions, which is what you'll get from me.)

I've taken a quick look at the abstracts, and there are 269 presentations related to Follicular Lymphoma. From what I can tell, none of them are the kind of "blockbuster" presentations that we sometimes get, the kind that will change the way people think about FL. Most seem to about research that helps us better understand what we already know about FL and its treatments -- and those are certainly valuable.

One thing I did notice, though (and again, this is just on my quick scanning of the abstracts), is that there are a lot of presentations involving Lenalidomide (also known as Revlimid). This makes a lot of sense. Lenalidomide is half of the treatment combination known as R-squared (Revlimid + Rituxin). The combination was the first non-chemotherapy treatment to be shown to be as effective as chemo like R-CHOP and R-Bendamustine. Researchers are going to want to build on that, and find new combinations that are even more effective. I plan to report on some of that.

There is some research on CAR-T as well, though not as much as I expected. It seems like CAR-T research doesn't wait for conferences to be announced. There's plenty of good stuff out there on CAR-T, even without ASH. I'll share some of that, too.

I'm also seeing some of the broader "Here's Where We Are" type of research. By this I mean, every year some researchers look at our assumptions about Follicular Lymphoma (who gets it, why they get it, how it is commonly treated), and does some research that shows whether or not those assumptions still hold up. For example, for many years (including when I was first diagnosed), the assumption was that the Overall Survival for FL was 8-10 years. Researchers keep challenging that by looking at different sets of data, so now we know that the OS for FL is closer to 18-20 years. So I've seen a few of those "here's Where We Are" studies, and I'll share those, too.

I'm looking forward to presenting some good news to you all. If there's bad news, I'll present that, too. But here's hoping there's much more good news than bad.

More soon.