Rituximab immunotherapy

Certain treatments such as allogeneic bone marrow transplantation or the more recent technique of nonablative donor lymphocyte infusions may offer curative opportunities to a small number of patients with low grade lymphoma. For the majority of patients, though, this disease remains incurable. Therefore, management must balance toxicity with efficacy. Rituximab is a new form of treatment with a highly favorable toxicity profile, and its short course of therapy on an outpatient basis has a positive effect on quality of life. Rituximab and related radioimmunotherapy strategies represent new directions for the treatment of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. Other forms of therapy, including vaccines or modulators of cell activity, promise to further improve the therapeutic index for lymphoma by increasing the specificity of treatment with less toxicity. An added bonus of rituximab is its potential to help unlock some of the mysteries of cellular regulation and dysregulation of normal and malignant B cells.