ASH 2012: Dr. Tom Kipps Explains BCR, Chemokines, and the Power of Blocker Drugs

This is part two of my ASH 2012 interview where my doctor, Dr. Kipps out of UCSD, makes the importance of BCR and chemokines to the B cells understandable. Even a vegan like me can understand his Thanksgiving dinner analogy. He too talks about the debt of gratitude owed to all the patients who enroll in the clinical trials.



More to come soon.

On a personal note, I am home a day early from five days in Manhattan at a hematology conference where my family doctor brain was crammed full of new malignant hematology facts and figures so that I can talk about more than CLL to the experts that I am privileged to meet. I was, for obvious reasons, the only family doctor there, and had to check "other" on my registration form as there were not expected any PCPs to show up. If you newbies to CLL think the acronyms for CLL are bad, hematologist are the perpetual masters of an expanding array of coded alphanumeric soups. I was constantly multi-tasking as I was learning the new material and scouring the web at the same time to decode the heme shorthand for all their therapies.

I did take time off to have some gourmet vegan and raw vegan meals at Pure Food and Wine, Candle 79, and Candle Cafe, dance and sing at a neo-Hassidic shabbat service at the beautiful B'nai Jeshurun,

and catch the very last day of the gritty ash-canny George Bellows exhibit at the Met (and of course revisit the masterpieces by Van Goghs and Caravaggios) all artists whose lives ended far too early, but whose influence will be eternal.

Despite the biting cold and the wind that careens channeled by the steel skyscraping canyons, just walking around Central Park (where I saw an extremely rare golden (or red) tail hawk) or by the skaters at Rockefeller Center or inside the bustle of the well preserved centarian, Grand Central Station, or with my fellow gawkers at Time Square, there is no place on earth like New York City.

After a wonderful visit with dear friends in Springfield, Missouri and undergoing a critical and demanding but extraordinarily successful external review for all the medical education work that I do, I had the help of a friend who drove me 80 miles to Joplin, MO to get the very last seat on an overbooked flight out of Missouri before the ice storm hit the midwest (all the local flights were unavailable and the next flights out were likely two days away). 

I got home a day early to warm and sunny California.

Home for a week, then off the Washington, DC.

Another cold, this time in Missouri, interfering with everything

Fighting my second miserable head cold since Thanksgiving. All have occurred since I reduced my IVIg. Three trips across the country in two weeks was too much for me. Though my Missouri hosts could not have been kinder and my board meetings went well, I feel tired and achy and can't wait to get home tomorrow to my wife, my own home, and some great raw vegan food. And a good night's sleep.

The plans and effort to teach primary care providers about CLL and transplants is moving forward and I am proud of that work. That was one of the reasons for the trip to Springfield, as the medical eduction will be posted on Primary Issues, an online physician journal based here and then presented in live programs.

I am hoping to cover the ASCO (American Society of Clinical Oncology) meeting in Chicago with the same type of primary care perspective.

And I may be working on a new technology project to help cancer patients manage their care, and will be asking for your feedback soon.

And please don't forget about the audio files to handle to stress of CLL. They are really pretty helpful and I am hoping to raise some money for CCLPAG in Canada and LRF in the USA.

I need to get better soon to work on all these projects.