High proportion of CD34+/CD38−cells is positively correlated with poor prognosis in newly diagnosed childhood acute lymphoblastic leukemia

Abstract

The CD34+/CD38− immunophenotype is used to identify candidate hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) and leukemia-initiating cells (LICs). However, the clinical significance of the CD34+/CD38−proportion in childhood acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) is not well established. Here, we found that a high proportion of CD34+/CD38− cells from 112 patients with childhood ALL was negatively correlated with the outcome. Also the percentage of CD34+/CD38− cells was associated with clinical and biological features of patients with ALL. Further, a high proportion of CD34+/CD38− cells in childhood ALL was positively correlated with advanced risk subgroups, which could predict risk stratification by receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve analysis. In addition, a larger tumor burden and lower survival rate were observed in mice injected with CD34+/CD38− cells, but not in mice injected with other fractions. Our data reveal that a high proportion of CD34+/CD38− cells is positively associated with a poor prognosis of childhood ALL, to further guide therapy of the disease.

Keywords::

• Percentage of CD34+/CD38− cells
• risk stratification
• prognosis
• childhood acute lymphoblastic leukemia

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Dr. Xin Li for flow cytometry technical support and Ms. Shu Zhang for statistical assistance.

Potential conflict of interest

Disclosure forms provided by the authors are available with the full text of this article at www.informahealthcare.com/lal.

This work was supported by grants from the Natural Science Foundation of China (90919013, 30871103), Natural Science Foundation of Chongqing (2010BA5008) and New Century Talented Program from the Ministry of Chinese Education (NCET-2008).