Brad Kahl: Progress - Rituximab

To answer your question about what have we done here, well there's a drug for example called Rituxuimab, which is a relatively new drug for lymphoma patients', it's not chemotherapy, it's a monoclonal antibody. The way this drug works is it's infused into the patient's intravenously and this antibody which is really a protein targets the tumor cells and it finds them and it sticks to the outside of them, it coats the tumor cells and when it does that it tries to trick the patient's immune system into coming in and helping fight the cancer, because the immune system has a limited ability to fight the cancer in the natural state, but when the Rituxuimab comes in it helps really trick the immune system and to fight the cancer. Because of this one drug we now cure more patients with certain curable lymphomas like diffuse large b-cell lymphoma and for patients with follicular lymphoma an incurable lymphoma, patients are living longer. We have participated in a lot of the studies that have shown that Rituxuimab added to chemotherapy improves outcomes, and we have made a big contribution in that regard. Now one of the challenges right now is moving beyond that, there's been a huge amount of progress in the last 10 years in lymphoma mostly because of this one development Rituxuimab and what it does when you add it too chemotherapy. If you look at the period before that it had been a period of relative stagnation for about 25 or 30 years, and it wasn't for lack of effort, but when you look at outcomes despite all the new things that come on the scene we really weren't curing more patients, we really weren't helping people live longer, most people, and we need to avoid another period of stagnation now so the challenge now is how do we capitalize on the progress we've just made and move beyond. It's going to require new therapies, better therapies and there are a bunch of these in the works right now that we are bullish on. For more information about how to support the UW lymphoma team or just to get more information about our efforts at the University of Wisconsin you can go to www.forwardlymphoma.org.