Hematologic Malignancies Patients receiving chemotherapy or transplants for hematologic malignancies unfortunately are not always cured of their disease. Most regimens used are close to the dose limiting toxicity because of the side effects of these regimens. This suggests that simply giving more chemotherapy is not the solution to preventing relapse.
More therapy is likely to result in more side effects.
Likewise, the small increases in chemotherapy that are possible are unlikely to have significant effects since the remaining tumor cells are those that are the most resistant to chemotherapy. We have been interested in using immunologic methods to address this problem. This type of approach makes sense because tumors that are resistant to chemotherapy are not necessarily resistant to immunologic therapy. Likewise, immunologic approaches usually have less toxicity than chemotherapy or radiotherapy approaches. Although both are immunologic therapies the patients receiving these therapies are very different.