The Molecular and Cellular Origins of Hodgkin's Disease

Hodgkin's disease is divulging its secrets at last. Despite the fact that Hodgkin's disease was the first lymphoma to be recognized as a distinct clinical entity 1, it has proved to be one of the most difficult lymphomas to approach molecularly. The clonal, malignant Hodgkin/Reed-Sternberg (H/RS) cells of Hodgkin's disease represent <1% of the cells in an involved lymph node and are characteristically surrounded by a mixture of granulocytes, plasma cells, and T cells. Although several cell lines have been derived from patients with Hodgkin's disease, it has been difficult to prove, in most cases, that the cell lines are clonally related to the H/RS cells of the patients. Therefore, molecular approaches to the etiology and pathogenesis of Hodgkin's disease have relied on single cell micromanipulation of H/RS cells coupled with PCR amplification of RNA and genomic DNA....