What is the role of rituximab in treating newly diagnosed DLBCL?
It’s very common chemotherapy regimen, R-CHOP again, five ingredients. The R is rituximab, this has been around now since 2000, 1998 really. And it is, you know, it was a revolutionary thing at the time. One of the first medicines to get people's immune systems to go and kill cancer cells. And so rituximab, in some ways, very elegant, doesn't have really almost any of the side effects of chemotherapy. It does have some little side effects. We mentioned them quick, but, overall very gentle, very well tolerated. People get rituximab not just for lymphoma but for even autoimmune diseases. So you can hear it's fairly gentle, does not cause baldness, does not cause nausea. All of those things.
What are its side effects and how are they managed?
Rituximab has one main side effect, which is that most of the first time you get it, can cause sort of an allergy like reaction. People feeling like they're wheezing or itchy or rash. Those things can be scary, but they're very quick. All we have to do to pretty much solve them is just slow down the medicine or pause it for a little while, give people some Benadryl or simple medicines. And even though it feels scary, in fact it can almost always be kind of worked through, doesn't become a big problem. And again, those reactions we call them infusion reactions almost only occur on the first infusion, maybe the second. But mostly just the first. And then if you keep getting it, reaction doesn't keep occurring.
So that's a pretty simple and safe medicine overall, but it increases the efficacy. Probably before that rituximab medicine, maybe we were curing about half of people with just CHOP. That was already pretty good compared to some other cancers. But adding the rituximab pretty safe thing increased it by 10%. Now we're maybe curing 60% of people on average. So that's pretty good.
And then these other ingredients, the CHO, all different types of chemotherapy and they do have chemotherapy like side effects. They can be tough on your immune system temporarily. Immune system goes down for a couple of weeks and then it comes back. They can make you feel tired. We have people getting our CHOP who are working full time jobs, but probably most of them are moving to part time jobs during this therapy.
And for a lot of people, one of the scariest things is those chemotherapies make people go bald. You're people will be bald for a few months at least, and then their hair grows back. Sometimes it grows back super cute. Sometimes the patients have gray hair, sometimes it grows back black. So it is a serious thing because that's kind of what makes everyone aware. Oh, this person is getting chemotherapy, so it's a big deal for yourself. Identity. But it's a pretty temporary thing. So not so bad.
So overall this chemotherapy is, sort of medium. It is gentler than a lot of other chemotherapies but tougher than some. So it's medium dose.
HealthTree • November 7, 2025