Dr. Mathias Rummel and the Story of Bendamustine
When the iron curtain fell in 1989, Mathias Rummel was entering medical school at the Goethe University Hospital in Frankfurt. The historic end of communism was shaping the future Dr. Rummel’s destiny and that of cancer patients around the world. Word of a novel chemotherapy drug developed in East Germany in the cold war 1960’s was finally reaching the west. “After the reunification, the West German people were a little bit skeptical to adopt a compound out of East Germany, as one can imagine," Dr. Rummel said at an American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) press briefing in June. The drug, bendamustine, sat largely ignored until being re-discovered in the 90’s by researchers such as Dr. Rummel as he was earning his PhD and pursuing post-doctoral research as a physician scientist.
For 18 years Dr. Rummel has explored bendamustine as a treatment for indolent (slow growing) lymphoma. In recent trials conducted by Dr. Rummel and colleagues, bendamustine combined with the antibody rituximab outperformed the current gold standard treatment, CHOP combined with rituximab, on every front. With bendamustine-rituximab (BR), far more patients were able to achieve a complete response (no disease detected) and the median progression free survival time (meaning their disease did not reappear or get worse) for BR patients was more than double that of those on CHOP-rituximab (R-CHOP). The median progression free survival period was over 5 ¾ years for BR patients versus approximately 2 ½ years for patients receiving R-CHOP.
Even better from a patient’s point of view, patients receiving BR in Dr. Rummel’s trials had far fewer and milder side effects. "Not a single patient in our trial experienced any hair loss with bendamustine," says Dr. Rummel. “These patients also experienced far less nerve toxicity and had fewer infections.” To get superior results and less toxicity is a rare win-win in oncology.
To further research new and better ways to treat follicular and other slow growing non-Hodgkin lymphomas Dr. Rummel founded a research collaborative in 1994 now known as StiL (pronounced ‘steel’ and an acronym for Studiengruppe indolente Lymphome, the legendary German Study Group for Indolent Lymphoma). “In Germany, the groups’ names are long strings of initials that you can’t pronounce or recall easily. I tried to create a name everyone will remember. And I designed the StiL logo,” says the Renaissance man and professor, who is also a musician, an oboist, and was a top ranked athlete in the pentathlon, which has five events to the triathlon’s three. One of the more finesseful of the Olympic events, the pentathlon features, running, swimming, horseback riding, fencing and precision pistol shooting, the military sporting arts of former centuries. We’re guessing if triathletes are iron men, then pentathletes are men of steel (or in Dr. Rummel’s case, StiL).
Today, thanks to Dr. Rummel’s open-minded curiosity and nearly two decades of dedicated work, the new-old drug bendamustine is rapidly on its way to potentially becoming the new standard of care for indolent (slow growing) non-Hodgkin lymphomas. It may very well topple CHOP, the four-drug regimen most commonly used to first treat non-Hodgkin’s lymphomas. “I came under heavy criticism from almost everywhere for pursuing this,” shared Dr. Rummel. “For years I was called irresponsible and worse for daring to challenge conventional treatment. I got a lot of pressure to stop. But in Germany we have a saying,” said Dr. Rummel with a wry chuckle, “ if you have a lot of enemies, you have a lot of honor.”
In addition to his duties as head of the Department for Hematology at the Clinic for Hematology and Medical Oncology at the Justus-Liebig University-Hospital, Giessen, Germany.
Professor Rummel is actively involved in a number of professional scientific societies, including the American Society of Hematology, American Society of Clinical Oncology, the European Society for Medical Oncology, the European Haematology Association, and the German Society of Haematology and Oncology. He is also a reviewer for a number of journals such as Haematologica, Annals of Oncology, Annals of Hematology, Leukemia and Lymphoma, and the Journal of Clinical Oncology. Dr Rummel is principal investigator of many clinical trials in leukemias, lymphomas, and ITP, and has published several book chapters and papers in peer-reviewed scientific journals.
