ABSTRACT
This chapter describes radioimmunotherapy (RAIT) trials with nonmyeloablative doses of radiolabeled antibodies, and discusses the results of the three reported trials of high-dose RAIT administered in the setting of bone-marrow transplantation. Conventional management of relapsed non-Hodgkin's lymphomas consists of the palliative administration of chemotherapy to patients with disseminated disease or the delivery of external beam irradiation for localized lesion. Unfortunately, these therapies expose normal and neoplastic tissues to equivalent doses of cytotoxic agents, and are rarely curative for patients with recurrent lymphomas. Two studies employing high-dose RAIT as the sole treatment modality prior to marrow transplantation for lymphomas have been reported, as well as one study employing sequential RAIT followed by high-dose cyclophosphamide and marrow transplantation. Massive doses of chemoradiotherapy in conjunction with autologous or allogeneic bone marrow transplantation afford long-term disease-free survival for 10 to 50% of patients with relapsed lymphomas, but 5 to 20% of transplanted patients die of complications.
