DETECTION OF NEOPLASTIC CLONE IN THE HYPOPLASTIC AND RECOVERY PHASES PRECEDING ACUTE LYMPHOBLASTIC-LEUKEMIA BY IN-VITRO AMPLIFICATION OF REARRANGED T-CELL RECEPTOR DELTA-CHAIN GENE
K. Ishikawa et al., DETECTION OF NEOPLASTIC CLONE IN THE HYPOPLASTIC AND RECOVERY PHASES PRECEDING ACUTE LYMPHOBLASTIC-LEUKEMIA BY IN-VITRO AMPLIFICATION OF REARRANGED T-CELL RECEPTOR DELTA-CHAIN GENE, Journal of pediatric hematology/oncology, 17(3), 1995, pp. 270-275
This study assessed the clonality of hypoplastic and subsequent recove
ry phases before the development of overt leukemia by molecular geneti
c analysis. We describe a boy who had transient granulocytopenia and a
nemia before the development of acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL). In
itially, his bone marrow was hypocellular with 23.6% of lymphoblastic
cells, whereas subsequent marrow after the administration of granulocy
te colony-stimulating factor (G-CSF) appeared almost normal without an
y lymphoblasts. At diagnosis, we found the rearrangement of T cell rec
eptor (TCR) delta gene in the leukemic cell DNA by Southern blot hybri
dization. The junctional sequence of the V delta 2-D delta 3 recombina
tion of leukemic cells obtained by polymerase chain reaction (PCR) was
used for a clonospecific probe. Using the probe, the presence of leuk
emic clone in the materials before and after diagnosis was examined. W
e found that the clonespecific probe could detect one leukemic cell in
10,000 normal cells, and we demonstrated the presence of the leukemic
clone at the initial hypoplastic and the subsequent recovery phase. T
he PCR method is very useful to confirm the presence of leukemic clone
even in a retrospective analysis using low-quality materials and may
be helpful to understand the pathogenesis of a smoldering preleukemic
phase.