After reviewing your lab results to obtain a precise diagnosis of your type and stage of lymphoma, a multidisciplinary team of doctors at the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center will design a treatment plan tailored for you.

All treatments can have side effects. Be sure to talk to your care team about how you’re feeling so they can help you manage these effects.

Chemotherapy

Chemotherapy drugs may be used alone or with other chemotherapy drugs. These drugs kill fast-growing cells, including cancer cells. They are usually given every two to three weeks, with breaks in between, for several cycles.

New chemotherapy strategies are being developed to target cancer cells while minimizing damage to healthy cells.  

Biological Therapies

Biological therapies are treatment that improve your body’s defenses against disease. The goal of is to make your immune system stronger to better detect and kill cancer cells that might be hiding or preventing your immune system from fighting.

These therapies can include special proteins known as monoclonal antibodies, which can help the immune system to hunt and kill cancer cells, or can attach themselves to the surface of cancer cells and inactivate them. Other biological therapies, such as CAR T-cell therapy (Car-T), work through a process in which some of your own immune system cells are collected, reprogrammed in a lab and then replaced in your body through an infusion. A third kind of biological therapy turns off cancer cell signals that allow the cells to hide from the immune system.

Antibody-drug conjugates can help to target cancer cells by attaching to a protein on their surface, allowing for direct delivery of the cancer-killing drug.

Stem Cell Transplantation

A stem cell transplant (also called a bone marrow transplant) gives a patient healthy blood stem cells following chemotherapy. Stem cells may be collected from the patient (referred to as an "autologous stem cell transplant") or another person (referred to as an "allogeneic stem cell transplant").

Autologous stem cell transplantation allows physicians to use higher doses of chemotherapy to kill cancer cells than the body would normally tolerate. Allogeneic stem cell transplantation provides a new immune system that has the capacity to recognize remaining cancer cells as “foreign” and to eliminate them from the body. 

Radiation

While most cases of lymphoma do not require radiation, there are situations where radiation may be included in the treatment, often in combination with other therapies. Radiation may be administered at higher doses over a short period of time (e.g. 2-5 days) or lower doses over a longer period of time.