Weill Cornell’s Dr. Ari Melnick on BCL6 Inhibitor Research: Implications for Lymphoma Research

Ari Melnick, MD, director of the Melnick Lab at Weill Cornell Medical College, was interviewed by the Lymphoma Research Foundation about his breakthrough research on a BCL6 inhibitor. Dr. Melnick discusses why this study is important for patients and what it could mean for the future of lymphoma research.

Click on the image below to read the Q&A.

Vitamin D and Lymphoma

By Rebecca Elstrom, MD

Vitamin D has recently received an enormous amount of attention as the realization that many Americans are deficient in vitamin D intersects with new data regarding the possible role vitamin D may play in regulation of cancer development. A frequent question from my patients has become, “Should I be taking vitamin D?”

Last year, a group of researchers from the Mayo Clinic reported that patients with lymphoma who are vitamin D deficient had a poorer chance of surviving their disease. This was a correlative study; it did not explore whether vitamin D deficiency actually caused the patients to respond more poorly to therapy. While it is possible that vitamin D played a causative role, it is equally feasible that vitamin D deficiency was a marker for patients who were sicker for other reasons, and therefore less likely to tolerate or to respond well to treatment. Further studies will be necessary to clarify whether vitamin D deficiency caused patients to do worse, and therefore whether supplementing vitamin D in patients who are deficient will lead to better outcomes.

Until these further studies are done, what should we do? There is no indication that having higher than normal vitamin D levels will be better than having normal levels; therefore, there is not a rationale for patients with normal levels to supplement vitamin D. However, for patients who are vitamin D deficient, it seems reasonable to supplement it to normal levels, whether it will directly impact lymphoma treatment results or not. A related question is whether every patient with lymphoma should be screened for vitamin D deficiency. Until the direct impact on lymphoma outcome is clear, I cannot recommend mass screening, but discussion between patient and provider is appropriate regarding this intriguing finding.

Lugano Conference: Maintenance Rituximab Improves Progression Free Survival in Mantle Cell Lymphoma

Weill Cornell’s Dr. Rebecca Elstrom attended the 11th International Conference on Malignant Lymphoma in Lugano, Switzerland and provides this update:

Maintenance rituximab improves progression free survival in patients with mantle cell lymphoma when given after rituximab in combination with chemotherapy. These results were reported at the 11th International Conference on Malignant Lymphoma this week. Dr. Kluin-Nelemans and colleagues compared R-CHOP chemoimmunotherapy to R-fludarabine/cyclophosphamide as first line treatment of patients over 60 with mantle cell lymphoma, finding R-CHOP to be superior in this group of patients. A second randomization, to rituximab maintenance or interferon, showed that the extended administration of rituximab prolonged the time to lymphoma progression by more than two years on average.

Although maintenance rituximab has been shown to prolong remissions in patients with follicular lymphoma after rituximab plus chemotherapy, this is the first time that rituximab has been shown to have a similar effect in mantle cell lymphoma, a type of lymphoma in which remissions tend to be shorter and more difficult to treat.