For all people diagnosed with follicular lymphoma, on the average, their survival is ten to twelve years from the time that they're diagnosed
ANNOUNCER: But the outlook for follicular NHL could be changing. A new therapy being developed uses the patient's own cancer cells to create a vaccine which instructs the patient's own immune system to fight the cancer. The very nature of NHL, a b-cell lymphoma, makes this idea work
JOHN LEONARD, MD: B cell lymphomas, as they develop put on the surface of the cell something called the idiotype, and the idiotype is a molecule that is on the tumor cells. Each B-cell as it develops, wears a hat in its surface. In lymphoma, all of the B-cells come from one parent B-cell, and they all have the same hat. So it's along the lines of, all of the bad B-cells have a black hat, whereas the normal B-cells have all different-colored hats. So essentially what we're doing is to try to train the immune system to fight the black hat wherever it is. The only cells that have the black hat are the bad cells, the bad guys. So the concept is basically that we're vaccinating the patient with the black hat.
RONALD LEVY, MD: Up until now, the immunotherapy that we've been using is based on antibodies. So we can make these antibodies in the test tube and then give the antibodies to the person. And these antibodies then find the target and bind to it and eliminate it. So this is what we call "passive" immunotherapy. It's made somewhere else, it goes into the person, it works, and then it goes away.
