Non-Hodgkin Lymphoma Treatment

Your treatment team will evaluate your case and carefully choose a chemotherapy drug — or a combination of drugs — that they determine will be most effective for your particular case.

At Sheba, we ensure that each patient is closely monitored following administration of chemotherapy drugs so that our doctors can adjust or change medications based on the patient’s needs.

Targeted therapy drugs work differently from chemotherapy drugs because they are made to identify and attack specific cancer cells while leaving healthy cells alone. In some cases, they are more effective than chemotherapy drugs and they often have different side effects.

There are many different kinds of targeted drugs, but they’re all manufactured to seek out the changes that make cancer cells different from healthy cells. They may then kill these cells by blocking chemical signals that tell them to grow; changing proteins within the cells so that they die; preventing new blood vessels from forming that would otherwise feed cancer cells; triggering the immune system to kill cancer cells; or bringing toxins to the cancer cells to kill them.

Some of the targeted therapy drugs used to treat NHL include:

• Proteasome inhibitors
• Histone deacetylase (HDAC) inhibitors
• Kinase inhibitors
• Bruton’s tyrosine kinase (BTK) inhibitors
• PI3K inhibitors

Radiation therapy uses high doses of radiation to kill cancer cells. It may be used alongside other treatments, such as chemotherapy or stem cell transplant, to increase effectiveness.

A bone marrow transplant, or a stem cell transplant, is a procedure that involves replacing damaged bone marrow with healthy bone marrow stem cells. Typically, a bone marrow biopsy is performed before the procedure. The patient may also be treated with chemotherapy or radiation therapy — or a combination of both — prior to a bone marrow transplant to ensure that all cancer cells have been destroyed.

There are three kinds of bone marrow transplants:

• Autologous bone marrow transplant. The stem cells come from you. They are removed from your body before chemotherapy and radiation treatment and stored in a freezer until you are ready for the transplant.
• Allogeneic bone marrow transplant. The stem cells come from a donor. They are removed from the donor, who must have a similar genetic makeup to you, and put into your body.
• Umbilical cord blood transplant. The stem cells come from a newborn baby’s umbilical cord, which are frozen and stored in a bank right after birth. Since the stem cells are immature, there is less of a need for perfect matching. However, blood counts take longer to recover with umbilical cord transplants.

After a bone marrow transplant, the new stem cells multiply and create healthy bone marrow in your body.

CAR T-cell therapy, or chimeric antigen receptor T-cell therapy, is a new type of cancer treatment in which the patient’s T-cells are taken and engineered in a laboratory to seek out and kill cancer cells.

T cells are taken from the patient’s blood and brought to a laboratory, where a special receptor that binds to proteins on cancer cells is added. The specially engineered T cells are then grown in the lab and infused into the patient.

This promising cancer treatment is just one of the many new and innovative treatments offered at Sheba Medical Center.