The National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) issued final guidance recommending the use of MabThera(R) (rituximab), as a maintenance therapy for patients with relapsed/refractory follicular non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL) responding to induction therapy with chemotherapy with or without rituximab. 1 This is an important breakthrough as it represents a new treatment approach that can allow patients with this potentially fatal disease to manage it as a chronic condition and live for an average of over four years before the disease returns.

Maintenance treatment with rituximab is a new approach to managing NHL, which allows patients who have responded to initial treatment to receive maintenance therapy every three months for up to two years. Data have shown that when treated with rituximab maintenance therapy, patients' risk of death was reduced by 48%. In addition, their average time of living disease-free was significantly extended to over four years (51.5 months) compared to just 14.9 months when left untreated with maintenance during this remission period (p