BACKGROUND Chronic lymphocytic leukemia remains incurable, despite the addition of rituximab to chemotherapy as an available means of treatment. The resistance of certain patients to this monoclonal antibody prompted us to set up in vitro studies of another CD20-specific monoclonal antibody, B1 (later termed tositumomab). We hypothesized that the membrane lipid organization of leukemic B cells ...

BACKGROUND Fc gamma receptor polymorphisms were linked to outcome in follicular lymphoma patients treated with single-agent rituximab, an anti-CD20 monoclonal antibody. In particular, 158F/F genotype of Fc gamma receptor 3A and 131R/R genotype of Fc gamma receptor 2A correlated with worse outcome compared to high-affinity 158V/V and 131H/H, respectively. We examined this association in the cont...

Wegener's Granulomatosis (WG) is a systemic vasculitis typically associated with antineutrophil cytoplasmic antibodies (ANCAs). A small proportion of patients are ANCA negative, however, and this is more commonly found in individuals with disease limited to the ears, nose, throat, and lungs, who do not have renal involvement. Rituximab is a monoclonal anti-CD20 antibody that has been demonstrat...

BACKGROUND Chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) is a disease of unknown aetiology. A patient with CFS had unexpected, marked recovery of CFS symptoms lasting for five months during and after cytotoxic chemotherapy for Hodgkin's disease. We reasoned that the transient CFS recovery was related to methotrexate treatment, which induces immunomodulation in part through B-cell depletion. METHODS In a cas...

The chimeric anti-CD20 monoclonal antibody (mAb), rituximab, is an established part of the management of many non-Hodgkin lymphomas. The in vivo action of rituximab remains elusive, and this partially reflects a lack of highly specific reagents to detect rituximab binding at the cell surface. Here we report a new high-affinity mAb (MB2A4) with fine specificity for the idiotype of rituximab. It ...

Cases of severely exacerbated CNS inflammation have been described in patients with MS under treatment with alemtuzumab, a pan-lymphocyte– depleting anti-CD52 monoclonal antibody. On the basis of the peripheral lymphocyte subset network (higher B-cell and suppressed T-cell counts) and marked clinical improvement following plasmapheresis and rituximab treatment (anti-CD20 antibody), a B-cell–dri...