Blood's Up -- and So Are the Outcomes

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Hello. This is Bruce Cheson from Georgetown University Hospital, Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center, in Washington, DC, speaking to you for Medscape Hematology. Today I am going to give you some teasers from the upcoming ASCO® (American Society of Clinical Oncology) meeting in Chicago, May 31 through June 4. This will be information about the 3 sessions focusing on hematology.

Lymphoma Highlights

For lymphoma, the world keeps changing and chemotherapy is nowhere in sight. We will see updated data on the combination of idelalisib, the PI-3 kinase inhibitor (formerly CAL101, GS1101) plus rituximab and/or bendamustine in the mix for patients with indolent non-Hodgkin lymphoma. This is very important data.^[1,2] Idelalisib is also being combined with everolimus, bortezomib, or bendamustine/rituximab in patients with mantle cell lymphoma.^[3] Those results should be of interest. And we cannot forget ibrutinib, the Bruton tyrosine kinase inhibitor. Ibrutinib has been combined with R-CHOP for untreated patients with CD20 positive lymphomas -- large cell lymphoma, mantle cell lymphoma, and so forth.^[4]

Of importance, an abstract of a study^[5]will be presented that confirms what some of us have been saying for a long time: that there is no role for surveillance CT scans in patients with diffuse large B cell lymphoma. Those are the interesting abstracts on lymphoma.