Revolutionary nuclear medicine therapy offers hope for non-Hodgkin lymphoma patients

By Jim Leffman via SWNS

A new nuclear medicine therapy could completely cure blood cancer non-Hodgkin lymphoma, scientists claim.

There are around 14,200 cases diagnosed every year in the UK, or 39 a day, killing nearly 5,000 Brits a year.

The survival rate for more than 10 years is 55 percent.

But just a single dose of radioimmunotherapy drug [177Lu]Lu-ofatumumab in cancerous mice extended their life by 221 days which researchers said was as good as a cure as it killed all their cancer cells.

Untreated mice lasted just 19 days and mice on other treatments lasted fewer than 60 days.

The standard treatment for many non-Hodgkin lymphoma patients involves chemotherapy and immunotherapy targeting the CD20 protein, which is highly expressed on most non-Hodgkin lymphoma cells.

Initially successful in many patients, they often relapse and some don't respond at all so scientists at the Mallinckrodt Institute of Radiology at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, Missouri looked into other possibilities.

They took ofatumumab, a recently developed anti-CD20 fully human antibody and combined it with 177Lu, a widely used therapeutic radioisotope that can kill cancer cells.

They then tested it on mice injecting them with human B cell lymphoma before leaving them untreated, and treated with ofatumumab or two varying doses of [177Lu]Lu-ofatumumab.

The best results occurred with 8.51 MBq (megabecquerel) of [177Lu]Lu-ofatumumab, for which the median survival was more than 221 days, essentially curing the mice.

The median survival of untreated mice and those treated with ofatumumab, and 0.74 MBq of [177Lu]Lu-ofatumumab was 19, 46 and 59 days, respectively.

Professor Richard Wahl, director of the Mallinckrodt Institute of Radiology said: "Although chemotherapy with immunotherapy combination is usually initially effective, many patients don’t respond or relapse, so we need improved therapies.

"In mice treated with 8.51 MBq of [177Lu]Lu-ofatumumab, detectable tumors were eliminated completely within two days.

"Mice treated with the other therapies or left untreated, on the other hand, continued to show tumor cells present.

“The excellent therapeutic results in this animal model of human B cell lymphoma suggest that this curative treatment should be tested in humans with non-Hodgkin lymphoma.

“If testing is successful in humans, this would represent an excellent new treatment option for patients with this disease.”

The study was published in the Journal of Nuclear Medicine.