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Measuring Success with Targeted Therapy for NHL

Summary & Participants

Since non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma can appear in many places in the body, it's often difficult to direct treatment to the specific cancer cells without causing harm to healthy tissue. Now doctors can deliver a lethal punch against NHL with a therapy that targets the cancer cells with radiation attached to antibodies that specifically seek out the cancer cells. Learn how this new weapon against NHL may help people with this disease.

Medically Reviewed On: July 15, 2008

Webcast Transcript

ANNOUNCER: Today targeted therapy is one of the most exciting developments in the treatment of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, a disease that affects over 55,000 Americans every year.

ROBERT DILLMAN, MD: A targeted treatment is one in which we are preferentially delivering or getting to a specific cell type the treatment that we want. So the limitation of traditional chemotherapy is we really don't have any control over where it goes. It's sort of diffusing all over the body and getting into cells.

With a targeted therapy, we know that relatively whatever we're trying to target is getting preferentially to the right cell.

ANNOUNCER: Your immune system uses antibodies, which circulate through the bloodstream and attack foreign substances.

Now scientists have artificially produced antibodies called monoclonal antibodies. These unique antibodies are designed to specifically seek out and attach themselves to cancer cells. In radioimmunotherapy, a monoclonal antibody is attached to a radiation source, creating radioactive antibodies whose only purpose is to destroy the cancer cells.

STEPHEN SCHUSTER, MD: What's been done by investigators to improve on the efficacy of antibodies in killing cells has been to use them as vehicles for delivery of radiation directly to the tumor sites. What radioimmunotherapy allows us to do is to deliver radiation to a patient that treats the entire body without exposing normal tissues to radiation. So you can treat somebody with multifocal or multisite disease.

ANNOUNCER: Radioimmunotherapy is given to a patient over about a week's time in comparison to chemotherapy, which takes several weeks.

Initially the patient receives a dose of the antibody without radiation attached, to kill stray cancer cells outside of the tumor. Next, the patient receives a low dose of a radiolabeled antibody. This allows doctors to see exactly where the tumor sites are.

ROBERT DILLMAN, MD: The unlabeled antibody is given to improve the distribution of the radiolabeled antibody so that you get the optimum distribution for treatment.

ANNOUNCER: A week later, the patient receives a high dose of the radioactive antibody that concentrates the radiation directly at the tumor site.

STEPHANIE GREGORY, MD: It's day one of treatment to essentially give a small amount of the radioactive material and then it is followed a week later with a definitive dose of radiation, so it is over within a week.

ANNOUNCER: Results are what matters and clinical studies indicate that radioimmunotherapy can be very effective.

STEPHEN SCHUSTER, MD: When patients are on clinical trials or under therapy, they can either have a complete response, which means disappearance of all disease; they can have a partial response, which -- which we describe as greater than 50% shrinkage of their disease.

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