Rituximab in the treatment of follicular lymphoma

Abstract

Despite previous observations, recent epidemiological and retrospective data show improvement in follicular lymphoma (FL) outcome, due to increased use of polychemotherapy in the last 20 years, even before the era of rituximab. Chemoimmunotherapy with rituximab - an anti CD20 monoclonal antibody - is an undisputable outbreak and one of the rare examples of novel treatment modalities, were an increased antineoplastic efficiency is achieved literally without any additional toxicity. Numerous, international randomized studies (conducted with participation of Polish centers) demonstrated statistically important benefit, of the addition of rituximab: it increased remission rate, remission duration and overall survival. It also results in an important improvement of life quality of the patients: fewer and less frequent relapses means less exposure to toxic and mostly inefficient chemotherapy regimens. Therefore including rituximab in an induction chemotherapy and later in subsequent consolidation is a recommended treatment of choice in follicular lymphoma. This recommendation is based on several phase III studies, were over 3000 patients we randomized. In this review paper, we present the results of recent, most important clinical trials in FL.