and colleagues described a lymphoma, which they termed plasmablastic lymphoma, that had some features of a diffuse large b-cell lymphoma but unlike this lymphoma developed exclusively in the oral cavity, consisted of plasmablasts that lacked b-cell as well as t cell marker proteins and, in 15 of 16 cases, were infected with ebv. in 2008, the world health organization recognized this lymphoma as a variant of the diffuse large cell lymphomas. subsequent to this recognition, numerous studies found this lymphoma to occur in a wide range of tissues besides the oral cavity and in individuals with various other predisposing immunodeficiency conditions. in 2017, this organization classified pbl as the most common member of a rare subgroup of lymphomas termed lymphoid neoplasms with plasmablastic differentiation.