Rutuximad.....for treatment for lymphoma?

i am not sure that i spelled the name of the drug correct, but if you sound it out that is the correct pronunciation.....anyone used this for treatment of lymphoma......did it work...do you know if it "wears off" and the cancer returns? anything that you could share would help very much....thank you very much.

Rutuximad.....for treatment for lymphoma?
I have used Rituxan along with standard chemo for my lymphoma, Unfortunately I have relasped but that is based more on the type of lyphoma I have, There are many people who have been treated with Rituxan alone and have been in remission (no evidence of disease) for 5+ years visit the Luekemia/Lymphoma Society website for more information and there is a discussion board that you can register to use to talk to others with the same issues


http://www.leukemia-lymphoma.org/hm_lls
Reply:You may want to try Vemma. good luck.
Reply:Rituximad (also known as "Rituxan") is still experimental at this stage, but certainly holds some promise for certain forms of cancer--including some lymphomas. Rituxan is part of a new wave of thinking in regard to cancer treatment: Immunotherapy. The idea behind immunotherapy is simply "teaching" the patient's immune system to recognize certain traits of their particular cancer and to elliminate it--just as it would a virus or bacteria. The hope is to come up with ways of battling cancer that don't also battle the PATIENT (the current standards of chemotherapy and radiation therapy kill off healthy cells right along with cancerous cells, which is where the horrible side effects come from). Bone marrow stem cell treatments are likewise undergoing clinical trials in an attempt to create a new immune system with minimal toxticity to the patient--and I'm here to attest that they're coming quite far with this (see "sources" below).





Rituxan is currently only approved for battling cancers that are CD20 positive, since these antigens are what Rituxan is formulated to recognise. Its long-term effects--both good and bad--are not yet fully known. Most of the time, Rituxan is used in conjunction with normal chemotherapy treatments. Studies are currently underway which involve Rituxan as a primary treatment. For more information on clinical trials, check out Cancer.org.
Reply:The correct spelling is "rituximab", and as others have described, it is a monoclonal antibody that targets a specific protein found in many forms of lymphoma, the CD20 antigen. It is considered an immunotherapy and not a chemotherapy because it doesn't kill off lymphoma cells directly, but rather, allows the body to recognize lymphoma cells and gets rid of the cancer cells that way.





Rituximab is a fairly well studied drug now (first FDA approved in 1998), and is used in many types of non-Hodgkin lymphomas. In terms of whether it "wears off", that question is still being studied in many clinical trials, to see if maintenance rituximab (meaning using it after a patient achieves remission) will improve the outcome. So I guess the answer is, yes, it works in many lymphomas, and it has been shown to improve the survival of patients, but no, we don't know if the effects wear off or not.

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