Objective: To evaluate the expression and clinical significance of early differentiation antigens of hematopoietic cells CD(34), CD(90) and CD(133) in acute leukemia (AL).
Methods: The expression of CD(34), CD(90) and CD(133) on leukemic blasts in 76 AL patients was detected with three-color direct flow-cytometry and CD(133) mRNA was detected with hemi-quantitative reverse transcriptive polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR).
Results: (1) CD(34) and CD(133) expression in AL patients was significantly higher than that in controls (46.37% vs 0.47%, 21.93% vs 0.29%, P < 0.01), but there was no obvious difference of CD(90) expression between them (0.51% vs 0.25%, P > 0.05). The expression of CD(133) antigen was highly correlated with CD(133) mRNA expression in both of the normal control donors and AL patients (r = 0.932, P < 0.01). (2) The positive rates of CD(34), CD(90) and CD(133) in all AL patients were 63.2%, 7.9% and 42.1%, respectively. The expression of CD(90) in ALL was higher than that in AML (P < 0.05). Positive expression of CD(133) in AML-M(4) was significantly higher than that in other AML subtypes (P < 0.01). The positive rate of CD(34) in B-ALL was much higher than that in T-ALL (P < 0.05). (3) CD(133) expression in AML was significantly correlated with the expression of CD(34) and HLA-DR (P < 0.01). (4) The expression of CD(34), CD(90) and CD(133) was not associated with the clinical prognostic factors such as cytogenetic or molecular aberrations, initial peripheral blood WBC counts, lactate dehydrogenase level, multiple drug resistant expression and age. (5) There was a trend toward lower completely remission (CR) rate and overall survival rate in CD(34), CD(90) and CD(133) positive cases, but only CD(34)(+)/CD(133)(+) cases had significant lower CR rate than negative ones (P < 0.05).
Conclusions: It is indicated AL has significantly higher CD(34) and CD(133) expression as compared with the normal controls. CD(133)/CD(34) co-expression might provide adverse prognostic stratification of acute leukemia.