A new study conducted all over Europe and led in Israel by Prof. Ofer Spielberg, director of the hematology department at Asuta Medical Center in Tel Aviv and full professor at the Faculty of Medicine at Ariel University, states: adding biological therapy eliminates the need for a bone marrow transplant in the treatment protocol for Mantel lymphoma type cancer.
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The research was done in collaboration with the Hematology Institute in Asuta Ramat Ha’Yil with researchers from the Hematology Institutes at the Sheba, Hadassah Ein Kerem, Rambam and Ichilov hospitals.
The study will be presented this week at the annual meeting of the American Society of Hematology (ASH). About 30,000 doctors and researchers from all over the world participate in the conference, with the current study being chosen to be in first place out of about 5,000 studies that will be presented at the conference.
Prof. Spielberg: “The groundbreaking research examined how to improve the treatment protocol for patients with Mantel lymphoma. The current treatment protocol includes a combination of chemotherapy, an antibody, and a bone marrow transplant. The experiment tested whether adding a biological treatment, ibrutinib, to the existing protocol is more effective than it treatment without bone marrow transplantation”.
According to him, the results of the study showed that bone marrow transplantation has no advantage in the treatment protocol and that giving chemotherapy in combination with ibrutinib treatment is equally effective in the patients’ recovery. The study found that the chances of recovery, without a bone marrow transplant, were 90% after a three-year follow-up.
To review the full study – click here