Blogs Archives

April 8, 2022

I Almost Cut My Hair

Yesterday, April 6, 2022, I had 2½ years of hair growth shorn. My last haircut had been before the annual ASH conference held in December 2019.

March 22, 2021

CAR-T Three Years Later: Dr. Brian Koffman Celebrating a Durable Remission

On March 22, 2018, I was an outpatient at the Seattle Cancer Care Alliance where I was transfused with my own T-cells that had been harvested a few weeks earlier, then genetically reengineered to attack my cancer, multiplied manyfold, then reinjected into my bloodstream to rest up, grow again,

February 12, 2021

We Have Lost a Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia (CLL) and Chimeric Antigen Receptor T cell (CAR-T) Therapy Pioneer

Bill Ludwig, 75, of Upper Deerfield Township passed away on Sunday, January 31, 2021 at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania where he had been hospitalized since December 1, 2020. This is the same hospital where, 10 years earlier, his life and the whole world of cancer treatment

March 23, 2020

It was 2 short years ago today, my CAR-T cells really learnt to play

🎶 It was 2 short years ago today, my CAR-T cells really learnt to play, They have been going in and out of glands, no guarantee that they would expand But let me tell their story to you, the treatment that so new these years, Brian Koffman’s splendid CAR-T

March 23, 2020

Grapefruit

I have not been able to eat grapefruit for more than a dozen years due to its annoying chemistry that interferes with the metabolism of multiple medications. It has been called the forbidden fruit due to its potent inhibition of cytochrome P450 3A4 (CYP3A4) that can lead to toxic

March 9, 2020

March 9, 2020: More good news 2 weeks since stopping ibrutinib

I stopped taking ibrutinib on February 20, 2020, a few months short of my 8-year anniversary. As I discussed in my last blog post, this was a difficult decision with conflicting advice. Would my CLL remain quiescent or would my lymphocyte count shoot up? Would my ITP (immune thrombocytopenic

March 2, 2020

Stopping ibrutinib: Saying goodbye to my friend for last 7 plus years.

On May 7, 2012 I took my first dose of PCI-32765 at Ohio State University, in Columbus, OH as part of a phase 1 trial of the drug that would later revolutionize the treatment of CLL as ibrutunib. But for the first several years it was known only by

January 26, 2020

Very special bone marrow biopsy and very not so routine labs

Dr. Brian Koffman explains his post-CAR-T bone marrow biopsy which will employ next generation sequencing by means of clonoSEQ testing that can find as few as one in a million CLL cells, not by looking for the cells themselves, as flow cytometry does when it scans the cells’ surface

January 19, 2020

ASH 2019: Dr. Brian Koffman Interviewed by Zack Pemberton-Whiteley, Leukaemia Care, UK

Our own Dr. Koffman was interviewed at ASH 2019 about importance of attending ASH for advocates, his own research, his highlights from ASH and much more. You can watch it here.