HLA Analysis of CD15+ Granulocytes of Leukemic Patients and Assessment of its Implication in Leukemia Immunotherapy

Durjoy Majumder,Debasis Bandyopadhyay,Sarmila Chandra,Subrata Banerjee

doi:10.5171/2014.982078

Abstract

It is of common knowledge that most leukemic patients succumb to infectious complications beside dysfunction in proliferation/differentiation of hematopoietic cells . Recently, it has been shown by several groups that there is a locus specific HLA class I downregulation in the leukemic cells. However, the HLA status of the phenotypically/morphologically normal granulocytes which can cope up with the infectious complications are not known. Therefore it may be worthwhile to study the HLA status in these cell types. We, therefore, investigated the status of HLA-ABC and HLA-DR in the CD15 + granulocytes and observed a higher expression of HLA-DR in several leukemic samples in comparison to normal volunteers (NV). Our data also suggest that only CD15 + granulocytes of myeloid leukemia, a clonal stem cell disorder, have a tendency of decreased HLA class Ia antigen expression. Moreover CD15 + granulocytes of NV showed an enhanced HLA-DR expression in presence of leukemic cells. Interestingly, CD15 + granulocytes collected from normal volunteers were observed to have phagocytic oxidative burst activity towards HLA class Ia downregulated primary leukemic cells. We therefore suggest that neutrophil transplantation may be used for the treatment of leukemia.

Highlights

Polymorphonuclear neutrophils (PMNs) constitute about 75% of the white blood cells of normal individuals’ peripheral blood and are the major component (>90%) of the granulocytes
Our study reveals that CD15+ cells of leukemic patients showed a marked reduction of HLA class Ia antigen expression, in myeloid leukemia
This may be due to the fact that myeloid leukemia being a clonal stem cell disorder, the phenotypically differentiated cells may have malignancy at the molecular level

Summary

Introduction

Polymorphonuclear neutrophils (PMNs) constitute about 75% of the white blood cells of normal individuals’ peripheral blood and are the major component (>90%) of the granulocytes. They take part in the acute inflammatory response and are the primary immune effector cells against extracellular pathogens. Some morphological alteration in PMN was observed in CML and MDS cases. In this connection, it may be noted that both CML and MDS are being regarded as a clonal hematopoietic progenitor cell disorder, and it may be interesting to study the status of PMN in these disorders. It would be interesting to find the HLA status (both class I and II) to get an idea about the pathophysiological state of the first line of defense mechanism of the immune system under the condition

Methods

Results

Conclusion