A new study presented at the 2013 Annual Meeting of the Society of Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging finds that radioimmunotherapy paired with chemotherapy may be a more effective treatment for battling advanced lymphoma.

According to the National Cancer Institute, approximately 79,030 people will be diagnosed with lymphoma in 2013, while 20,000 are estimated to die from the disease this year.

Currently, advanced lymphoma patients are treated with high dose chemotherapy to eradicate cancer before undergoing bone marrow transplantation — but researchers wanted to investigate whether adding radioimmunotherapy with a radionuclide that targets tumors with a cancer-killing dose of radiation would help boost survival rates.
The study compared two groups of advanced lymphoma patients about to receive bone marrow transplants. One group received chemotherapy alone, while the other received both chemotherapy and radioimmunotherapy. The patients who were treated with radioimmunotherapy had a 64 percent survival rate — a significant improvement, researchers said.

"The results gave them a better chance of survival overall, with very low side effects compared to [chemotherapy] alone, which appeared to be rather inferior in its results," said S. Tzila Zwas, professor of nuclear medicine at Sackler School of Medicine, Tel-Aviv University.

While the prognosis varied widely, patients with no limiting factors who had received radioimmunotherapy had a 100 percent chance of survival at the two-year mark.

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