Despite still recording and touring, Def Leppard guitarist Vivian Campbell has not been cured of the Hodgkin's lymphoma he was diagnosed with in 2013.
Appearing on the Lymphoma Voices podcast, he says, "I'm still dealing with the lymphoma. It's sort of like [the game] Whac-A-Mole. You beat something back and then it pops up somewhere else. But it's been a pretty consistent battle, but it hasn't been too difficult for me. I deal with it fine. I've been able to live my life...
"For the bulk of those 10 years, I actually was doing immunotherapy. Starting in June of 2015, I started taking a drug called Pembrolizumab. I did that as part of a clinical trial... I'm happy to say that it worked well for me. So from June of 2015 until essentially the end of 2022, I was able to, just about once a month, go in and do an infusion of Pembrolizumab and just go about my life, and it was very, very easy for me to do...
"But it sort of lost its efficacy a year, year and a half ago. And we could tell in the scans. I would do scans every three to four months just as a matter of protocol anyway to see what was happening. And my oncologist now had been telling me for essentially the last two years that the Pembrolizumab was not being as effective as it once was and that we were gonna have to consider different treatments. So anyway, in November of last year, we did a combination of Pembrolizumab with three chemo drugs...
"Unfortunately, it didn't put me into remission; we fell a little bit short of that. So I just recently, at the end of July, started doing six cycles of a combination therapy of a chemo drug called Brentuximab and an immunotherapy drug called Nivolumab. I'm halfway through that... So far, so good...[except for] hair loss as a side effect... So, I'm a little bit more proactive by going and cutting it super, super short."
Campbell and Def Leppard wrap up their 2023 tour tonight in Brisbane, Australia; Saturday in Sydney and next Tuesday in Melbourne .