A new treatment for B-cell non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma (B-NHL) has been shown to help prolong the survival of patients with this disease.
B-NHL is often treated with chemo, radiation, and/or radiation and/or chemotherapy. These interventions are often followed by autologous bone marrow transplant and/or hematopoietic stem cell transplant if an appropriate donor is available. However, the standard treatment for B-NHL is with chemotherapy and radiation.
The first of these treatments was approved in 1991, and B-cell non-Hodgkins lymphoma is now the #1 cancer of people under the age of 35 in the US. Unfortunately, B-NHL is a very aggressive type of cancer that kills about one in five patients. Because B-NHL responds poorly to chemo, patients are often forced to live with the disease for years before it’s even possible for the doctors to do anything about it.
Unfortunately, melanoma is also a very aggressive type of cancer and even though the standard treatment is with chemotherapy and radiation, it’s still a very deadly disease. The problem is that while B-NHL responds to chemotherapy, melanoma tends to be resistant to it. It’s easy to imagine a drug developed to kill B-NHL that only works against melanoma. But this has already been done before, and it’s quite likely that we’ll be in for some very bad news.
That well be could be the drug being used for the treatment of melanoma. Scientists have been working on this for quite some time, and the results could be very promising. The FDA recently approved a drug called Ixelizumab. It’s a monoclonal antibody that was originally designed to treat HIV infection. When it was tested on stage 4 prostate cancer it was found to be very effective.
It could be a great breakthrough for a lot of people. But there are some very important caveats. One of them is that there are some people who are resistant to the drug. It may take months or even years of treatment before everyone can get it. And even then it may not work for everyone. This might be a great place to go in the future for people who have no choice.
This past December, I had a friend diagnosed with melanoma. The first treatment was a year-long intravenous course of dasatinib. It’s a drug that blocks the action of a type of protein called B-Raf kinase. At its worst this drug has a 90% chance of killing you. At its best it has a chance of lasting for about two years. Needless to say, I was pretty excited when I heard that it was coming to us.
Dasatinib is a medication that is supposed to be much better than a lot of the treatments for melanoma. For example, some people have a 90 percent chance of surviving if they get a course of doxorubicin. That’s one of the reasons the FDA approved the drug on the market. But it’s not the only reason. Dasatinib does have a nasty downside: Its side effects can be brutal.
Dasatinib is on the list of things that most people with melanoma worry about, so naturally I was excited to be able to talk to people who’ve had it. I had no idea that I knew so many people who had had it. Its side effects are pretty much the same as with any cancer drug, but they don’t have to be deadly. As I read about people’s experiences, I was really amazed how many people had no idea what was going on.
The side effects of dasatinib are not the same as most other cancer drugs, but it is pretty much the same as chemo. You have to be aware that your immune system is trying to destroy your cells and try to get them to stop growing, but your body can’t make it through that process. Dasatinib blocks the cells from growing, but it doesn’t kill them. This means you get to live a long, healthy life.