What is Non-Hodgkin's Lymphom... Video Transcript

Webcast Transcript

ANNOUNCER: Sometime doctors take a wait and see attitude with slow-growing lymphoma.

JOHN LEONARD, MD: If patients are asymptomatic, and the disease is at a relatively low level, the disease isn't bothering them, isn't causing symptoms, often the patient isn't treated. There is no clear advantage for the patient to begin treatment early in the course of their disease if the disease isn't bothering them. And that's something that's hard for patients sometimes to understand, that you can diagnose a cancer but decide not to do any treatment for it.

ANNOUNCER: However, when treatment is needed, either for indolent or aggressive lymphomas, science offers several options.

RONALD LEVY, MD: The traditional treatments are mostly chemotherapy treatments. We also have radiation treatments, so-called radiotherapy, and combinations of radiotherapy and chemotherapy.

DAVID FISHER, MD: The more recent therapies that have come along are immune therapies, which are basically therapies to use the immune system to help attack the disease. Lymphoma cells seem to be more receptive to immune therapies, because they're part of the immune system. And so, the immune system is used to sort of working with those type of cells and can cause immune reactions to be effective against these cells.

ANNOUNCER: In the future the immune system, the very source of the problem in NHL, may be the key to unlocking a way to defeat it.

JOHN LEONARD, MD: If we can teach the immune system to go after those cells wherever they are, and that that immune effect can be longstanding, that is a potential way to have an effect against the tumor cells, and that's really one of the goals to give a longer-lasting effect that the patient can benefit from, potentially, without being on a treatment that they have to receive constantly.

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