Michael E. Williams, MD, ScM, Byrd S. Leavell Professor of Medicine and Professor of Pathology, University of Virginia Health System, discusses personalized medicine in mantle cell lymphoma (MCL).

An important area of interest in MCL is the tailoring of treatment to individual subtypes, says Williams. MCL is not one disease, but a spectrum of disease. About 20% of patients have very indolent disease that can be observed without treatment, while others have blastoid variant MCL, a very aggressive subtype of the disease.

These subtypes need to be taken into account as therapy is crafted for individual patients, and there will not be a one-size fits all approach, says Williams.

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Dr. Michael Williams on Treating Subtypes of MCL

Michael E. Williams, MD, ScM, Byrd S. Leavell Professor of Medicine and Professor of Pathology, University of Virginia Health System, discusses a phase II study that explored frontline lenalidomide (Revlimid) and rituximab (Rituxan) for patients with mantle cell lymphoma (MCL). 

In this multicenter, phase II study, led by Jia Ruan, MD, at Weill Cornell Medicine, patients with MCL were treated with lenalidomide and rituximab in both the induction and maintenance setting. At 30 months, the overall response rate for evaluable patients was 92%, and the complete response rate was 64% (95% CI, 46 - 79).

Although it was a small study that only included 38 patients, these findings were impressive, says Williams. The study shows that nonchemotherapy-based approaches can still be very effective, he says. Interestingly, patients experienced the same benifits with the lenalidomide and rituximab combination regardless of whether or not they were classified as having lower or higher-risk MCL, WIlliams notes.

View more from the 2016 Congress on Hematologic Malignancies

Michael E. Williams, MD, ScM, Byrd S. Leavell Professor of Medicine and Professor of Pathology, University of Virginia Health System, discusses frontline lenalidomide (Revlimid) and rituximab (Rituxan) in mantle cell lymphoma (MCL).


Michael E. Williams, MD, ScM

Articles

Dr. Michael Williams on Treating Subtypes of MCL

Dr. Michael Williams on Lenalidomide Plus Rituximab in First- Line MCL