ABSTRACT
This chapter presents an overview of several different approaches, each with potential to accelerate recovery from, or prevent, radioantibody-induced myelotoxicity. The major side-effect of most anti-cancer therapy is myelosuppression, which can limit both the dose and the frequency of treatment. Complete remission rates and disease-free survival might be improved if myelotoxicity could be reduced and dose intensification was made possible. Dose intensification using the SA approach to reduce myelotoxicity has also been evaluated in the bulky subcutaneous and micrometastatic intrapulmonary GW-39 xenograft models. Radioimmunotherapy (RAIT), like several other therapeutic modalities, is limited by hematopoietic toxicity. The challenge of improving the clinical success of RAIT is to increase tumor accretion of radioantibody and decrease hematologic toxicity. An alternative approach to reducing hematopoietic toxicity is to control the removal of unwanted blood-pool activity of the radioantibody. Injection of anti-antibodies results in immune complexation of free radioantibody that is then processed by the reticuloendothelial system, resulting in rapid excretion of urinary radioiodine.
