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Biotech / Medical : Cell Therapeutics (CTIC) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Icebrg who wrote (363)	1/4/2005 2:24:21 PM
From: zeta1961	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 946

Rituximab plus CHOP slows follicular NHL Posted: January 04, 2005(From ASCO.org) I can retrieve the paper if anyone is interested.. These findings "clearly show that patients with indolent NHL can have a prolonged progression-free survival, without further therapy, following frontline treatment with rituximab plus CHOP, with a median of about 7 years," senior investigator Dr. Antonio J. Grillo-Lopez told Reuters Health. In the December 1st issue of the Journal of Clinical Oncology, Dr. Grillo-Lopez of the Neoplastic and Autoimmune Diseases Research Institute, Rancho Santa Fe and colleagues note that CHOP alone is curative in a subset of patients with aggressive lymphoma. However, there is no cure for those with indolent disease. To see if CHOP along with rituximab could improve response in these patients, the researchers studied 38 subjects with low-grade B-cell NHL who received no prior chemotherapy or who had no more than four previous standard treatments. The subjects were given six cycles of CHOP and six infusions of rituximab and were followed for a total of 9 years. Although 9 (24%) of the subjects were considered poor risk, the overall response rate was 100%. Eight-seven percent of the patients had a complete response or an unconfirmed complete response. The median time to disease progression was 82.3 months and the median duration of response was 83.5 months. The researchers also note that seven of the eight patients who were bcl-2 positive, became negative and three sustained this molecular remission for "several years." Now, after a decade, the team points out, "42% of patients are still in remission; median time to progression is nearly 7 years." Further follow-up "will show whether there will be a plateau in this curve indicating that some patients may be cured," Dr. Grillo-Lopez said. Patients with indolent NHL, he added, "should have the benefit of therapy such as this, with curative intent rather than the nihilistic 'watch and wait' approach which dooms them to die from their NHL with no possibility of a cure."