Lymphoma is the 5th most common cancer in Canada and can be very aggressive. Most lymphomas are not curable, so long lasting remission has been the recent goal of treatments. Lymphoma patients have been treated for years with a chemotherapy regimen including an antibody called Rituximab. Antibodies are proteins that can recognize cancerous cells and tag them for destruction. Rituximab has been extremely effective in treating aggressive lymphomas, but the American Society of Oncology has been developing an alternative antibody, Obinutuzumab, with the goal of improving the length of remission. In a recent trial, they found that Obinutuzumab increases remission length in some forms of lymphoma, but not for others.
Lymphoma is a cancer that most commonly affects the lymph nodes, but can also appear in other organs in the body. In the most advanced cases, lymphoma can spread to the bone marrow. Effective treatments are therefore very important, but challenging to develop. Many years ago, doctors treated all cancers including lymphomas, with radiation, however lymphomas are able to spread quickly, making radiation challenging. Radiation is also unable to treat lymphoma that has spread to the bone marrow, so it is not a treatment option for advanced lymphomas.
Chemotherapy is able to treat cancers that involve multiple areas of the body, including the bone marrow, which radiation is unable to do. When Rituximab was developed as a supplementary antibody to previous chemotherapies, it dramatically increased the effectiveness of chemotherapy and the length of remission for lymphoma patients. Obinutuzumab is a similar antibody to Rituximab, so doctors chose to test it to determine if it works even better than Rituximab. The American Society of Oncology performed a randomized trial on 1,418 lymphoma patients to test the effectiveness of Obinutuzumab in prolonging remission in comparison to Rituximab. Obinutuzumab was at least equally as successful as Rituximab in all patients, and for certain types of lymphoma, it was found to be more successful than Rituximab.
Chemotherapy is a great example of the applications of chemistry to the medical field. Chemotherapy uses antibodies to target specific cells, which requires tagging those cells for destruction. Chemotherapy also uses other molecules that prevent reactions that harm the DNA of a cell, which is a common cause of cancer. Advances in chemistry have a significant impact on cancer treatments in the form of chemotherapy. Since Obinutuzumab succeeds in prolonging remission for some lymphomas, further advances in chemotherapy could lead even more successful treatments for all lymphomas.
-Sydney Inthof
