Biology of T-cell leukemia virus: search for an animal system.

Abstract

Adult T-cell leukemia (ATL) is a newly recognized mature T-cell malignancy which is endemic in southwestern Japan (Uchiyama et al. 1977; T- and B-cell Malignancy Study Group 1981; Hattori et al. 1981). Cultured T-cell lines were established from ATL cells or from normal human cord lymphocytes coculti- vated with ATL cells (Miyoshi et al. 1979, 1980, 1981b). These cell lines were found to carry type C virus particles and ATL-associated antigens (ATLA) which reacted speeifieally with sera from ATL patients (Hinuma etal. 1981; Miyoshi et al. 1981a). The type C virus was characterized as a retrovirus and designated as adult T-cell leukemia virus (ATLV) (Yoshida et al. 1982). ATLA were identified as structural proteins of ATLV and ATLV-determined Polypep¬tides (Yoshida etal. 1982; Yamamoto and Hinuma 1982). Independently, a type C retrovirus, designated as human T-cell leukemia virus (HTLV), was isolated from American patients with cutaneous T-cell lymphoma (Poiesz et al. 1980, 1981). ATLV was shown to be identical or closely related to HTLV by serology and nucleic acid homology (Popovic et al. 1982). ATLV is now considered an isolate of HTLV (Watanabe et al. 1984). Antibodies to HTLV core proteins were also detected in sera of Japanese patients with ATL (Kalyanaraman et al. 1982; Robert-Guroff et al. 1983).