The
field of Stem Cell Transplants is expanding rapidly. What was once
reserved for only the most desperate patients with aggressive
lymphoma has become a standard therapy for virtually any type of
Lymphoma.
In the past patients with indolent
types of lymphoma such as follicular NHL rarely underwent a Stem
Cell Transplant until they had tried at least 3-4 other therapies.
The wisdom of the time was that this very aggressive treatment
should not be used when less toxic and less risky treatments were
still available.
This thinking has changed quite
dramatically in the past few years. Since about the year 2000 there
have been many novel new approaches to SCT's that combine
immunotherapy in the form of Rituxan, Zevalin, Bexxar, Interferon
and others, which have proven to dramatically improve the
progression free survival for patients with indolent lymphoma. It is
still too early to say what effect these new approaches will have on
long term survival, but the early results are quite impressive.
Immunotherapy combined with chemotherapy is becoming the wave of the
future.
Below are some selected medical
abstracts about some of these new SCT protocols. These will be
updated from time to time to keep them current. I will begin
by posting a link to an abstract that doesn't deal with SCT's but
does deal with the role that Rituxan has had in showing the first
change for the better for follicular lymphoma in more than 20 years.
Note:
Although the abstracts presented below all deal with immunotherapy
based SCT's for low-grade lymphomas the results for those with
aggressive lymphoma are equally impressive.
