News You Can Use!
When I opened the mail last Friday, I was elated to see a two page spread about radioimmunotherapy in The Lymphoma Research Foundation's quarterly newsletter. Dr. Oliver Press (Fred Hutchison Cancer Center and Chair of the Lymphoma Research Foundation's Scientific Advisory Board) was interviewed. Here are a few things he had to say, quoted directly from the article:
Regarding toxicity: "The important thing for doctors and patients to remember is that with radioimmunotherapy, it is generally a brief one time treatment in contrast to chemotherapy where usually six to eight cycles are administered. Consequently, with chemotherapy there are six or eight episodes of bone marrow suppression, whereas with RIT, there is just one." He later states, "There is a lot of misinformation suggesting that RIT is more damaging to the bone marrow than it really is."
Regarding use of future treatments if necessary (remember, we have been hearing excuses from doctors that re-treatment is not possible): When asked if RIT precludes future treatments, Dr. Press said, "I think this is a big misconception that a lot of patients and doctors have. Radioimmunotherapy does have some impact on the bone marrow reserve but it is probably no greater than giving a course of chemotherapy. Two studies have looked at the ability to give subsequent therapies...and found that it is quite feasible to tolerate further chemotherapy or collect stem cells for autologous stem cell transplantation in nearly all the patients where it has been attempted."
Regarding RIT as front-line treatment: "It (RIT) is only FDA-approved for use in relapsing patients because the early clinical trials were done in that setting. Having said that, I think that some of the most exciting new data is in frontline treatment of patients with follicular lymphoma. There are six studies that have tested RIT as frontline treatment and all six of them have shown outstanding results. The overall response rates in those studies have been between 90% and 100% and the complete remission rates in those studies have been anywhere from 60% to 95%. The duration of responses in the studies that are mature have all been more than five years and many patients have remained in continuous complete remission without ever relapsing."
Regarding financial issues: "I have found that patients who receive RIT are generally extremely happy with the convenience of the treatment because they come into a treatment center for a test dose one week and a treatment dose the next week and then they are done. However, physicians often don't feel RIT is as convenient as the patients do because the hematologist or oncologist needs to coordinate treatment with a nuclear medicine physician. These logistic considerations have resulted in RIT being underutilized. There are also billing and reimbursement issues. The hematologist or oncologist can't bill for the radiolabeled antibody treatment administered by the nuclear medicine physician so there is a financial disincentive for referring patients for this treatment."
Mort and I have been discussing some of these very issues for the past several months, but Mort and I are patients who were saved by RIT. Dr. Press is one of the world's leading lymphoma experts and one of a handful of scientists who began researching radioimmunotherapy several years ago. He has seen it from its infancy to its clinical use. His words are powerfully credible, and I thank him and LRF for shining such a spotlight on RIT.
If any of you would like to have a copy of this article to take to your doctors, please let me know and I will scan it in and post it. It could be a valuable tool when discussing RIT with you doctor.
Betsy