Empowered Patient Podcast Minimizing Toxicity of Treatments for B Cell Lymphoma with Dr. Dan Gold MEI Pharma
Dr. Dan Gold is the President and CEO of MEI Pharma and is tackling non-Hodgkin's B cell lymphoma to bring a therapy to patients minimizing the toxicities that are associated with current treatments. Their drug candidate zandelisib is a P13K delta inhibitor. It is being studied in lymphoma in B cells to determine if this is a way to block signaling and diminish the malignant capacity of the B cell.
Dan explains, "We sort of think of lymphoma in two flavors. it's either a more chronic disease, or it's a more aggressive disease, and then there is sort of a spectrum that spans that. In the less aggressive, we call it indolent diseases, the patients will live with these cancers for many, many years. "
"So for the cancers that we treat most commonly or that we're studying most commonly, they're more of the indolent variety. It is interesting because the fact that it's indolent, the patients will respond to therapies. But, eventually, the efficacy of that therapy will wane, and they'll need something else. But there are a number of options that can be staged over the years, again, to keep that cancer at bay, or at least minimally invasive and minimally problematic for many, many years. That's the area that we're focusing all of our energies on currently."
"What we have done, and what we have strived to do is to diminish those toxicities so that the patient will stay on the drug as long as possible. So what we've kind of pioneered for this class of drugs, because of the properties of zandelisib, is that we initially give the patient the drug on a daily basis for a couple of months to get that tumor at bay and shrink it as much as we can."
@MEI_Pharma $MEIP #Lymphoma #BloodCancer #P13K #P13KDelta #OptimizedDosing #SanDiego