Skin lymphomas of the T‐follicular helper type

There is a group of lymphomas (cancer from immune system cells) in the skin made of neoplastic cells resembling T-follicular helper (TFH) cells (a very speciﬁc subtype of immune cell). These lymphomas are rare and poorly described to date, and there is no standard treatment for them. These lymphomas do not appear to ﬁt with other established types of lymphoma, either in the skin or elsewhere in the body. With researchers from France, the aim of the study was to describe this lymphoma, primary cutaneous peripheral T-cell lymphomas with a TFH phenotype (pcTFH-PTCL), with more precision and compare this group of lymphomas with all other types of skin lymphoma. This was the ﬁrst study of a large group of patients with a diagnosis of this skin lymphoma (8 women and 15 men) to look at both the clinical and molecular characteristics of the disease. Our ﬁndings show that skin lymphomas of the TFH type may be a standalone group, and at the same time sharing some traits with other lymphomas, including angioimmunoblastic T-cell lymphoma (AITL). AITL is an aggressive disease occurring in the lymph nodes (small organs located throughout the body, housing immune cells) which sometimes extends to the skin. In con-trast, skin lymphomas of the TFH type evolve over a longer period and remain almost exclusively in the skin. In conclusion, the shared features may allow, in the future, for the usage of the treatments developed for AITL to be used with patients diagnosed with skin lymphomas of the TFH type. Further studies are needed to clarify remaining questions about this rare group of lymphomas.