Hodgkin and Reed-Sternberg cells of classical Hodgkin's disease overexpress the telomerase RNA template (hTR).

There is accumulating evidence to suggest that Hodgkin and Reed-Sternberg (HRS) cells represent the malignant cell population in Hodgkin's disease (HD). A recent report that HD tissue is in most instances devoid of telomerase activity was therefore unexpected. Since telomerase activity was determined in whole tissue extracts and HRS cells comprise only a small minority of the cells in the affected tissue, the telomerase activity of the HRS cells might have escaped detection. To test this possibility and to clarify whether HRS cells contain the enzyme telomerase, 13 cases of classical HD were analysed by three different methods. The presence of telomerase was studied at the single cell level by a sensitive radioactive in situ hybridization method employing a probe specific for the telomerase RNA template (hTR). In addition, tissue extracts were studied for telomerase activity by a modified TRAP assay and for hTR by reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR). The extractive methods revealed telomerase activity in eight and hTR in all of the 13 HD cases studied. In situ hybridization located large amounts of hTR in the HRS cells of all 13 HD cases and low to medium amounts in some of the non-malignant lymphoid bystander cells. These results indicate that HRS cells constitutively overexpress telomerase and thus use this enzyme for stabilizing their telomeres. This substantiates the malignant nature of HRS cells. Furthermore, the results confirm that normal lymphoid cells can express telomerase. In consequence, methods of measuring telomerase in tissue extracts are not suitable for determining the presence of this molecule in lymphoma cells, since the vast majority of lymphoid neoplasms contain significant amounts of non-neoplastic lymphoid cells. Copyright 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.