Transcript
My name is Neil Kay. I work at Mayo Clinic. My specialty is hematology. My focus for the last many years has been chronic lymphocytic leukemia.
With respect to the second talk that I'm giving today, this is a talk on immune status in CLL—what's going on, and why is it abnormal? The main issue there is that CLL patients, even if they're untreated, have immune deficiency.
It's a very complicated immune deficiency, with many, many immune cells that are either absent in terms of numbers or function. Unfortunately, that results in 2 primary issues. One is major infections requiring hospitalization, and the occurrence of second malignancies, particularly skin— basil, squamous, melanoma.
This is a very big clinical complication and is not necessarily eradicated when individuals are treated. The mechanism for the immune deficiency has been a big focus in my laboratory in collaboration with a number of other people I work with.
Today's lecture will deal with why T-cells are defective, which predominantly revolves around immune synapse dysfunction and how that might be reversed. The other part of it relates to the status of the bone marrow function and why normal hematopoiesis, normal blood cell production, is abnormal in CLL, and also how that might be reversed.
The rationale behind those two lines of investigation are that if we understand why they're abnormal, we could devise strategies that could reverse them without necessarily putting patients through formal therapy.
That will be a primary goal in that talk.
