Therapeutic vaccines for non-Hodgkin B-cell lymphoma.

Despite current therapeutic strategies for B-cell lymphoma, including chemotherapy and transplantation, the majority of patients are not cured. The characterisation of several tumour antigens has made immunotherapy an interesting approach to the treatment of patients with lymphoma. The idiotype region in the immunoglobulin expressed by the tumour B cells is not only a clonal marker but also a tumour-specific antigen. For this reason, the idiotype is an ideal target for immunotherapy. Extensive studies of idiotype vaccination have been done in murine lymphoma models and some of these strategies are now being tested in clinical trials. In the last few years, new strategies to improve the immune response against lymphoma cells have been studied, including the use of DNA or recombinant viruses encoding tumour-antigens, genetically modified tumour cells and a number of immune adjuvants targeting dendritic cells, T cells or NK cells.