This week I have been at the IWCLL meeting in London. This meeting began many years ago in Paris and I have been to most of them. We were shown a photograph of the meeting in Barcelona in 1991 where there were 44 delegates. Most of the 44 were at the London meeting, along with over 700 others. It is no longer a workshop. Nevertheless I would suspect that no disease has shown such an increase in interest over the past 20 years as CLL.
I will be blogging about some of the new stuff to come out of the meeting at a later date, but the hot news is about the Binet-Rai Medal which is presented at the meeting. The medal was first given to Kanti Rai and Jaques-Louis Binet for their invention of the CLL scoring systems. The third medal was given to Michael Keating for his work with fludarabine. The fourth and fifth medals were given to Nick Chiorazzi and myself for the discovery of the importance of VH mutations. The sixth medal was given to Daniel Catovsky for his work on the morphology of CLL and the MRC trials. The seventh medal was awarded this year posthumously to David Galton who died earlier this year. David was one of the first physician scientists to work on CLL and established many of the features of the disease and described lymphocyte doubling time as a prognostic factor. His widow and children accepted it on his behalf. The eighth medal went to Carlo Croce for his discovery of the miR genes 15 and 16 at 13q14 in the minimally deleted region and his TCL-1 mouse model of the disease.
4 comments:
This can be an interesting meeting. Most of the folks attending, obviously, you've never heard of, but the usual suspects are probably there, presenting papers and ruminating on findings.
It will be nice to have the highlights given to us.
I do remember being quite deflated when a top CLL researcher told me point blank that vaccines would never, ever work against CLL because the patient's immune system was so terribly compromised.
Perhaps one day I will share his name with you all.
Congratulations on the award! Well-deserved!
Congratulations indeed!
I would like to ask two questions: what is this vaccine issue that the anonymous commenter points out? And what would be a good paper to read on Croce's work that is really new to me? Thanks
I have worked on idiotypic vacines in CLL. There are other tumors such as follicular lymphoma where such vaccines have a better chance of working, because the immune system is less impaired. If they can be shown to be beneficial there, then CLL might be worth considering, but only if we can figure out why the immune system is impaired in CLL.
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