“Mantle cell lymphoma is a relatively uncommon form of non-Hodgkin lymphoma, and it has been treated traditionally with combination chemotherapy, which achieves a high response rate—but the responses have not tended to be durable, and the disease has remained incurable,” said Bruce D. Cheson, MD, professor of Medicine, deputy chief of Hematology/Oncology, and head of Hematology at the Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center, Georgetown University Medical Center, Washington, DC. Many of the chemotherapy approaches today are very aggressive. One of the problems with an aggressive strategy is that, according to Cheson, “Patients with mantle cell lymphoma present with a median age in their 60s, and they can’t tolerate some of the aggressive regimens very well. Less-intensive regimens like R-CHOP are not terribly effective. So now we have the opportunity to have well-tolerated, oral, highly effective therapies for a disease for which previous treatments have been very intensive, very aggressive, and suboptimal.”
Read entire article from Targeted Oncology here
Ari M. Melnick, MD, on Emerging Therapies
The opportunity of which Cheson speaks is with newer targeted therapies. “The goal is to reduce the intensity of therapy,” he said. “The concept ‘more is better’ is not valid. ‘Different is better’ is the operative hypothesis. We’re going away from aggressive regimens like hyper-CVAD and stem cell transplants, and moving in the direction to taking some fairly innocuous pills. It is a major seismic shift that is occurring now in the treatment of mantle cell lymphoma, and it’s not that far away. Within a matter of just a couple of years, I expect that these drugs will become an important part of the treatment of mantle cell lymphoma, replacing very aggressive, intensive regimens.”
Melnick is the Gebroe Professor of Hematology/Oncology at the Weill Cornell Medical College.
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