Over 20% of patients with chronic lymphocytic leukemia carry stereotyped receptors: Pathogenetic implications and clinical correlations.

The chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) immunoglobulin repertoire is biased and characterized by the existence of subsets of cases with closely homologous ("stereotyped") complementarity-determining region 3 (CDR3) sequences. In the present series, 201 (21.9%) of 916 patients with CLL expressed IGHV genes that belonged to 1 of 48 different subsets of sequences with stereotyped heavy chain (H) CDR3.