Stanford School of Medicine
Multidisciplinary Cutaneous Lymphoma Group

Clinical/Translational Research

It is an exciting time of new hope and challenges. Stanford’s Multidisciplinary Cutaneous Lymphoma team involving our faculty, staff physicians, clinical/research fellows, and students would like to update you in our activities and thank you for your thoughtful and generous support of our clinical and research endeavors. We have been very active in the last few years in the development of new techniques and tools to help us diagnose skin lymphomas or detect any spread to sites other than skin. We have also made important progress and contribution towards the development of new therapies that are or will be available to our patients with skin lymphomas.

The Stanford Cutaneous Lymphoma Collaborative Team has 3 major categories of research focus: epidemiology/clinical outcomes, newer/better diagnostic/staging/prognosticating tools, and development of new/novel therapies. Our research is an end product of intense and interactive collaborative work among the members of Dermatology, Radiation and Medical Oncology, Surgical and Dermatopathology, Diagnostic Radiology, and Blood and Marrow Transplantation.

Dr. Youn Kim continues to serve as the overall Director of Stanford’s multidisciplinary cutaneous lymphoma clinical and research programs. Dr. Rich Hoppe is the Co-Director along with Drs. Ranjana Advani and Dr. Sabine Kohler being key players.

Stanford’s Cutaneous Lymphoma group also leads in therapeutic trials in collaboration with other academic centers and industry. Stanford has been involved in clinical trials that have resulted in FDA approvals for patient use. This is a new era where there are multiple promising new therapies that are under clinical development and in various phases of human trials. We are playing a key role in each of these important drug developments.

As introduced in prior bullet, Stanford would like to lead the efforts in “molecular targeting” of therapies in cutaneous lymphomas. This is a where using the state-of-the-art molecular tools, we characterize/profile patients’ cutaneous lymphoma at the molecular level (gene expression patterns) and try to match the treatments that can affect the patients’ abnormal gene expressions to become more normal. We and others are beginning to look at how certain drugs affect gene expression profiles in patients. This will take decades to perfect, but Stanford hopes to start and lead the effort. We strongly believe that improved targeting of therapies linked to individually tailored treatment strategies is definitely a sure road to smarter therapeutic management of cancer including cutaneous lymphomas.

In collaboration with our faculty colleagues in Blood and Marrow Transplantation service at Stanford, we are developing more appropriate induction and preparatory regimens for allogeneic blood stem cell transplantation. Despite the risk and severity of allogeneic transplants, we and other have shown that this treatment is a potentially curative solution for patients with very advanced disease.

The Multidisciplinary Cutaneous Lymphoma Team at Stanford are dedicated in continuing the best clinical care and pursuing the collaborative research endeavors to improve the quality of our patients’ lives and bring us closer to curative therapies.

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