Cure for CLL?

Eliminating minimal residual disease as a therapeutic end point: working toward cure for patients with CLL.

Deep remission and prolonged disease-free survival can be achieved with first-line chemoimmunotherapy (CIT), such as combined fludarabine, cyclophosphamide, and rituximab, in the majority of patients with chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL). More modest results are reported with less intense regimens like obinutuzumab plus chlorambucil. Clinical assessment has limited sensitivity in detecting re...

Bendamustine for Cll and Nhl

comorbidities, many patients eventually relapse or do not qualify for standard therapies 1,2. Additional treatment options that improve tolerability while maximizing efficacy are therefore needed in those settings. Bendamustine hydrochloride is a bifunctional alkylating agent with clinical activity across a number of cancers, including breast cancer, small-cell lung cancer, multiple myeloma, cl...

Cure for Stammering

Breakthrough cure (for mice)

Many a science writer has fantasized about capping a story with the headline “Good News for Sick Mice!” One of the toughest struggles is deciding how to cover a story that has produced tantalizing, even amazing, results in laboratory animals but could well be a total bust by the time it gets to humans. That issue came up in early July, when Elan Pharmaceuticals, an Irish company with laboratori...

Identifying CLL antigens for future combinational therapy.

In this issue of Blood, Dubovsky et al use novel methodology to identify lymphocyte cytosolic protein-1 (LCP1) as a putative tumor-associated antigen, Ag (TAA) that may play a critical role in regulating CLL cell homing to the leukemia niche. Their translational research approach further shows that kinase inhibitors (KIs) have the potential to block LCP1 activation, which raises the possibility...