XV iwCLL 2013: Interview with Dr. Castro on the Biology of CLL

My long time friend and crusader, Dr. Januario Castro, who works with Dr. Kipps at UCSD, besides caring for CLL and transplant patients, is doing important research into the basic biology of CLL.

He covers some of the novel bench science presented at the first morning in Cologne, Germany for iwCLL 2013.

Before you dismiss this as not being clinically relevant, I humbly suggest you that spend the ten minutes to listen to Dr. Castro making the biology easily accessed and digested. More than that, he points out some of the lingering challenges still facing CLL therapy.

Without this basic research on cancer cell biology, we could not have the amazing progress we have seen in the last few years. As Dr. Jeff Sharman said in a prior interview, the therapies explode when you crack the biology. Without the novel understandings of what is happening in CLL, we would be still be talking only about old school chemotherapy.

In this interview, first Dr. Castro is honest about what we know and don't know about clonal evolution. Next he outlines what was a recurrent theme at the conference, the important regulatory role of very small pieces of RNA called micro or mRNA. Turns out that much of our DNA is busy doing much more than just making proteins. Finally he talks about his own research that he presented on the versatility of the CLL cell, and how he hope to limit its options.



Thanks, Dr. Castro.

So much to share. I will be revisiting some of these same themes to expose some of the controversy and different takes on the same data.

 Stay tuned. A total of ten doctors interviewed over the three days.