Researchers have a new hope for a new therapy

I love sharing good news – it’s one of the best parts of my job. When a new therapy or protocol is showing promising results – I love to hear it, then I attempt to understand it and share it with you. Today’s encouraging word? PCI-32765.
Ok, it doesn’t sound terribly impressive, but wait. It’s a new drug being assessed in a Phase I clinical trial at the Virginia G. Piper Cancer Center in collaboration with the Clinical Division of the Translational Genomics Research Institute.
Progress in developing new treatments for cancer has traditionally been painfully slow because only 2-4 percent of all cancer patients enroll in clinical trials. This is especially true for uncommon cancers such as leukemia's and lymphomas. Participants in this trial are volunteers for whom other cancer treatments have failed.
"This study is going very well. It is a very promising agent," Dr. Tibes said of PCI-32765, which uniquely targets the molecular abnormalities of lymphoma cells. "This is a recently identified cancer mechanism that we are going after with this drug in lymphoma cells."
Dr. Tibes, the principal investigator for the clinical trial, said PCI-32765 is at the frontier of research and offers a new therapy option for patients with advanced lymphomas and chronic lymphocytic leukemia.