LEADER

Autoimmune disease

Treating human autoimmune disease by depleting B cells

R J Looney

University of Rochester, Rochester, New York, USA

Correspondence to:
Correspondence to:
Professor R J Looney, University of Rochester, 601 Elmwood Avenue, Rm G-6454, Rochester, NY 14642, USA;
John_Looney@URMC.Rochester.edu

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Rituximab treatment is safe and justifies continued study

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Keywords: rituximab; Goodpasture's disease; cryoglobulinaemia; anti-CD20; rheumatoid arthritis; autoimmunity

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

The development of rituximab has raised the hope of a new therapeutic approach for autoimmune diseases. In the United Sates rituximab is approved for indolent CD20+ B cell lymphomas, and it is also being evaluated in many different types of lymphomas as well as other B cell malignancies such as Waldenström's macroglobulinaemia and chronic lymphocytic leukaemia. World wide more than 300 000 patients with B cell malignancies have been treated with rituximab.¹ Because rituximab is generally well tolerated and because it selectively and profoundly depletes B cells, its role in immune mediated diseases, especially autoimmunity, is now also being explored. Two articles in this issue of the Annals of the Rheumatic Diseases report the clinical use of rituximab in patients with autoimmune diseases.^2,3 The first article consists of three case reports using rituximab in three different autoimmune diseases, and the second reports a series of 22 patients with . . . [Full text of this article]

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