[Greg H]

Neil,

Your speculation is just along the lines of what I was thinking. Better one identifiable enemy with multiple weapons than several bands of rag-tag guerillas to fight. I'm going to ask my doc to weigh in on this next appointment.

I also like your point on the drug front. Reading abstracts and clinical trial descriptions, it sometimes seems a matter of "Well, Revlimid worked for this, let's recruit some folks with this other disease variant and see if it will work for that, too." I kind of gather that Vidaza and Dacogen are like this. That they work is pretty clear; how they work is a bit more speculative. (But thank god someone picked up those orphans, dusted them off, and got the FDA to approve them.)

The folks up at NIH working with Campath for younger MDS patients with Trisomy 8, HLA-DR15, etc. seem to be an exception. Talking with one of the principal investigators, I found he had a firm theory of why the therapy should work (which I could even understand, more or less). When I dug through some of their old research papers, I found they've been carefully working their way through the bits and pieces of the theory, testing it here and there. They've kind of carved out a piece of the MDS puzzle, figured out how to define it, begun to understand how it works, and now, based on that , are trying to figure out how to treat it.

That sort of careful work is definitely the kind of trial that I would be more interested in participating in, as opposed to the "let's throw this against the wall and see if it sticks" variety.

On the other hand, if it works, it works. I'm not going to turn down the Vidaza if I need it at some point!

Thanks for weighing in on my question; I'll be curious to see if anyone surfaces to brag about their five different abnormal cell lines.

Thanks!

Greg