Prognostic significance of CD123 and CD96 in adult acute myeloid leukemia

Abstract

Acute myelogenous leukemia (AML) is a malignant disease of the bone marrow in which hematopoietic precursors are arrested in an early stage of development resulting in accumulation of undifferentiated and functionally heterogeneous populations of cells that interfere with the production of normal blood cells. During normal developmental progression from stem cell to progenitor cell to mature cell, mutations may potentially occur at any point during this evolution, giving rise to a malignant entity. A mutation in a normal stem cell might give rise to a unit that could be considered as leukemic stem cells (LSCs). LSCs initiate and sustain the clonal growth in AML. The poor response to therapy in AML patients raises the expectations that the presence of LSCs in quiescent state, resembling the normal stem cells, may add to the resistance to conventional chemotherapy. An enormous effort has been taken to identify specific surface markers in order to differentiate between normal and leukemic stem cells. Our study aimed to assess the expression of CD96 and CD123 in leukemic stem cells and its correlation to prognosis in adult patients with acute myeloid leukemia Using multi-color flowcytometry, we analyzed the expression of CD96, CD123 within CD34+/CD38- cells in bone marrow samples of 40 AML patients at diagnosis and at day 28 . In addition, 16 bone marrow samples from patients with non-haematological malignancies were examined as a control group.