Making a better antibody: All is not lost

Abstract

Effective anticancer therapy requires effective targeting of the malignant cells. In this issue of Blood, Beers and colleagues demonstrate that rituximab-induced loss of CD20 from the surface of B cells may explain why rituximab is more effective in some B-cell malignancies, such as follicular lymphoma, than in others like CLL.1 They also provide evidence that anti-CD20 mAb, designated type II anti-CD20 mAb, induce considerably less down-modulation of CD20 than rituximab, and therefore could be more effective therapeutically.