Particularly regarding the latter, we have previously demonstrated that immunogenic epitopes can be isolated from the heavy complementarity-determining region 3 (VH CDR3) sequence of both human and murine CLL bearing stereotyped [i.e. (quasi)identical] B cell receptors (BcR), efficiently processed and presented by CLL cells and effectively recognized by specific T cells (18). The gene discussed is BCR; the disease is B-cell chronic lymphocytic leukemia.