Search the Community

I want a place we can post information/data about diseases or medical conditions, their various treatments, and potential recoveries (%age) or life expectancies therefrom. You see something that says 20% of all patients undergoing a medical procedure recover fully, I (well we) need to know and act accordingly when putting together out DP lists. I am aware of and understand the competitive nature that brews in these parts--I mean I want to win a DP as much as anyone--but if we collectively can spot trends in medicine, seems a reasonable thing to share. It's not like we are sharing NAMES of people with said afflictions. For instance, my research shows a person undergoing the Whipple procedure for pancreatic cancer adds about 18 months to their lives. That's it. You see someone getting a Whipple procedure, pencil them in for your DPs 12-18 months down the road, depending on age I reckon. Isn't that something we all should know? Of course. Am I going to tell you who had a Whipple procedure done and when? Of course not. -------- Anyway, what instigated this was I needed a place to post about this new refractory large B-cell lymphoma gene therapy treatment called Yescarta. Yescarta, also referred to as a CAR-T therapy, works like this: T cells, or immune system cells, are filtered from a patient’s blood and reprogrammed to target and kill cancer cells. Returned to the patient, the revved-up cells can continue multiplying to fight the disease for months or even years. Initial trials were promising. "After a (median) 15.4 month follow-up, shows that more than half of patients [who responded] are still progression-free. Indeed, 42% of patients continue to respond to Yescarta, and 40% are disease-free. In this analysis, 12% of patients experienced grade 3 or higher cytokine release syndrome (CRS), and 31% experienced neurologic toxicities." Yescarta was only approved by the FDA in October 2017, and despite some early promoted as a breakthrough by maker Gilead Sciences, Inc., only 6 patients have actually gotten the costly therapy, while others linger on waiting lists [waiting lists for the $373,000 treatment have grown to at least 200 people, shrinking as patients die]. -------- And my Yescarta research was instigated by the death of Kristine McCulley (58). She died February 9, 2018 after a yearlong battle with lymphoma. She had been one of the first 6 people in the country to try Yescarta (allowed/perscribed only after chemotherapy and radiation have been unsuccessful). McCulley received her reprogrammed T cells just before Christmas 2017. So what have we? Unsure of what cancers the trial patients had, but a bit less than half taking the drug achieved some beneficial results, with some extraordinary results as well. However, when put into practice of our small sample size of 6, we already have 1 person (16%) who didn't last 50 days. Pretty safe to say the drug had zero or nearly so effect. Anyway, a drug to keep an eye on to see if the other 5 patients do well, or don't do well, so that if you read of someone taking Yescarta in the future you'll have some reasonable expectations as to what that means. SC