I received my bone marrow biopsy results yesterday. They read as follows: "No morphologic or immunohistologic evidence of residual hairy cell leukemia." In other words, negative for hairy cell. You may recall that the bone marrow infiltration in late October was still 30% six months after Cladribine chemotherapy treatment, just before receiving Rituxan. The NIH Clinical Trial for new patients combining Cladribine and Rituxan has done a great job! Excellent news to end one of the most awesome weeks of my life.
The only thing that can put a bigger smile on my face is this:
My daughters
My peripheral blood FACS was also negative for HCL. The FACS for the bone marrow aspirate is still positive for HCL (dropped from 4% in late October to 2.1% last week), but the CD20 absolute binding tests show a dramatic decrease in the binding capacity (dropped from a capacity of 80,000 molecules of Rituxan to 8000) because a large amount of Rituxan is now already bound to the existing CD20 proteins on the cells now that I've received Rituxan treatments. This means it may still be working. CD20 proteins are overexpressed on the outside of the hairy cells, and Rituxan binds to those proteins then kills the hairy cells. A significant amount of the cells may continue to die over the next six months, and there is a possibility that the bone marrow aspirate will also test negative six months from now.
I am now in complete remission !!!
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