
Chapter 10: Studying Fludarabine (Part I)
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Description
Dr. Keating explains that he came to focus on chronic lymphocytic leukemia because of a disagreement with Dr. Deisseroth over the mission of MD Anderson. He notes that, at the time, it was impossible to eliminate CLL cells from the body and he began to examine the effectiveness of Fludarabine –the first investigator to do so.
Identifier
KeatingM_02_20140520_C10
Publication Date
5-20-2014
City
Houston, Texas
Interview Session
Topics Covered
The Interview Subject's Story - The Researcher; The Researcher; Professional Path; Discovery and Success; Healing, Hope, and the Promise of Research
Transcript
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
I’d like to get a sense now of how your own research sits in that history, so tell me about the evolution of your projects. You spoke last time about the database you set up and all that information you amassed. What else were you working on at the time, or what did that lead to?
Michael Keating, MD:
Well, I think that one of the things that was apparent was that in acute leukemia it was either death or glory. If you got rid of all the leukemic cells, patients could live a long time and some of them would be cured of their disease. So that it became one of the mantras of just don’t control the disease, but can we eradicate it. And because I had this disagreement with the new boss in hematology department, Dr. Deisseroth, as to the main mission of the MD Anderson, which I thought was helping to treat patients with cancer and, as a secondary event, study the biology, etc., I ended up looking at chronic lymphocytic leukemia. And the whole process there was that it was impossible to get complete remissions. It’s impossible to cure the disease. Many patients will live a long period of time without any intervention, so first do no harm. It wasn’t until we started to use a new drug, Fludarabine, which when we were looking at it, we were looking at it primarily in acute leukemia at a fairly high dose of 100 milligram per meter-squared, and in the lymphomas and chronic lymphocytic leukemia we were at a much lower dose of 30 milligram per meter-squared.
Recommended Citation
Keating, Michael MD and Rosolowski, Tacey A. PhD, "Chapter 10: Studying Fludarabine (Part I)" (2014). Interview Chapters. 1178.
https://openworks.mdanderson.org/mchv_interviewchapters/1178
Conditions Governing Access
Open
