Ten months following the diagnosis of Hodgkin's disease (HD), a 46-year-old woman presented cutaneous and leukemic involvement by CD30+ anaplastic large cells, from which a continuously growing, exogenous growth factor-independent T cell line was established. The cultured cells are phenotypically and genotypically T cell in type, negative for EBV, HTLV-I and HTLV-II viral sequences, and release soluble CD30 into the supernatant. Karyotype analysis disclosed several chromosomal abnormalities, but none on chromosome 5q. The involvement of the short arm of chromosome 17 prompted us to investigate the TP53 gene by means of the polymerase chain reaction single-strand conformation polymorphism (PCR-SSCP) analysis, but no alterations were found in exons 5-8.