SPEAKER 1: So diffuse large B-Cell Lymphoma is a cancer of the immune system, specifically your B lymphocytes or white blood cells. It's the most common type of lymphoma in the US and about 20,000 patients a year are diagnosed with the diffuse large b-cell lymphoma in the United States.

The majority of patients diagnosed with the diffuse large b-cell lymphoma will be effectively cured with initial chemotherapy. Unfortunately, about a third of patients will either not respond to their chemotherapy, or relapse, or have persistent disease at the end of chemotherapy, or relapse following completion of their chemotherapy. And unfortunately, prognosis for these patients is generally poor. So in terms of prognosis, it's a disease that we're really trying to study to try to identify patients with poor prognosis so that we can potentially use novel therapies or identify different treatments for patients with poor prognosis.

Patients who achieve this event free status at two years, have a prognosis that is similar to what it was prior to their diagnosis.

So we looked at their outcome at their diagnosis and then looked at subsequent outcome of patients who were in remission at one year, as well in patients who were in remission at two years. And so what we found was, is that there was, even though there was a significant survival gap at diagnosis, which we would expect, we saw that gap diminish the longer the patients were in remission.

We initially looked at almost 750 patients that were enrolled in our specialized program of research excellence grant, which has a molecular epidemiology resource. So it's a grant that we share with the University of Iowa, and then it's also done here at Mayo Clinic, where we prospectively enroll patients diagnosed with lymphoma.

And we looked at then patients treated with standard of care, which for diffuse large B-Cell lymphoma would be Rituximab plus a anthracycline chemotherapy, which is most commonly given as our chop. And so we followed these patients over a period of time and then evaluated their outcome. And really bench marked survival of these patients compared to the age and sex match general population.