Erik Ranheim: Why Donate to Lymphoma Research?

Donations specifically to lymphoma research are I think helpful because of what Ron Skoronski calls it; it’s the “Red Headed Stepchild” of cancers. And in part I think that true, you’ll notice that when high profile individuals, be it entertainers or politicians or their spouses get breast cancer or prostate cancer that there’s a lot of attention paid even recently the Professor at Carnegie-Mellon with pancreatic cancer, sort of bolstered the image of that disease and made it a priority for some people. That tends not to happen in lymphoma and I think its in part because people don’t really understand what it is, if I say you have breast cancer or colon cancer people understand where that is, what it is, and then usually because it’s a common disease they know a relative or a friend whose had that disease and so it touches them a little more personally. The fact is lymphoma is not all that rare and in particular in the b-cell lymphomas many of them are what we would call indolent cancers, they don’t provide the dramatic situation of someone saying you have 6 moths to live in most cases. More often your talking about someone in their 30’s, 40’s or 50’s who has a disease is that although incurable going to provide them with 5 or 10 years or more of fairly good quality of life, but of course if you think about that starting at age 30 or 40 that’s not such a great prognosis, and unfortunately the biology of these tumors is such that often times the typical chemotherapy regimens that we use for fast growing cancers the whole point of those regimens is they kill fast growing cells, and they kill those cells faster then they kill the patient, then his intestine, his hair, his skin. In these diseases because the cells don’t grow very fast but instead just stay alive too long, very often these chemotherapy drugs don’t work which is why we sort of need novel strategies and as I said before because they’re immune system cells there are actually a number of strategies we can use and we already know a lot about their basic biology. So, driving funding towards these diseases I think in the end will actually benefit all these other cancers as well, because the fact is that despite a lot of improvements if you can’t surgically remove most of these cancers which of course lymphoma almost never can you do such a thing, if you can’t surgically remove them the fact is that chemotherapy almost never works, it can help but it rarely cures people with breast cancer or colon cancer. And so if we can get basic mechanisms for how normal cells become cancer cells we can directly target those pathways they may be broadly applicable to other cancers. We’ve developed a really excellent website in collaboration with our partners and that’s at www.forwardlymphoma.org.