IWCLL 2011

It's a good job that I didn't go to the IWCLL meeting in San Diego - the meeting was being held in Houston!

The feedback that I had is that it was a different kind of meeting with many more young people there. There were a few talks by the old-stagers, but a some of these were described as rather old-hat. There is very little point in presenting old data at a meeting like this. There were no reports of major clinical trials, in particular no reports of trials of CAL-101 or PCI32765, though Susan O'Brien did give a case report on each with spectacular results.

Bendamustine + rituximab looks like it is performing better than I thought it would, so one must ask the question why the drug company needed to cheat in its clinical trials.

The Binet-Rai medal was presented to my old friend Guillaume (or Guillermo or just plain William) Dighiero. He was the guiding light in the French Trials and has done some important molecular studies. He now works at the Pasteur Institute in Uruguay