Understanding Blood Cancers: From Diagnosis to Treatment Pathways

And so can you explain to us what is a blood cancer? Are there different types and which are most common?

So blood cancers, you know, unlike the solid tumors that we know of, they originate from blood system, blood and lymphatic system.

Those can be divided into several types based on two factors.

One, their cell lineage.

So either they could be myeloid or they could be lymphoid.

Or they could be stratified on the basis of the rate of growth.

So they could be bucketed into acute blood cancers or chronic blood cancers.

So when we put these two stratifications together, we come up with blood cancers that grow fast and blood cancers that don't grow fast.

Blood cancers that are of myeloid origin and blood cancers that are of lymphoid origin.

Furthermore, You can broadly classify blood cancers into leukemia.

These are cancers that originate from blood and bone marrow, which is the production house, the factory of our blood and immune cells.

Secondly, lymphoma.

These are blood cancers that originate within the lymphatic tissue, immune cells within our body that originate within the lymphatic system.

And third is myeloma, which is a cancer that arise from a monoclonal abnormality from mature plasma cells.

So in the immune system, we have B cells and we have T cells.

In normal immune system, they have different functions to protect us from different type of foreign invaders, infections, immune evasion against cancers.

Multiple myeloma is a disorder of mature B cells, also called plasma cells.