Antigens associated with acute leukemia detected in the primed lymphocyte test.

Mixed lymphocyte culture (MLC) studies of families with several leukemia patients, all potential bone marrow transplant recipients, demonstrated that cells from acute myelogenous leukemia patients (5 of 5) and acute undifferentiated leukemia patients (1 of 4) in relapse stimulated autologous lymphocytes as well as lymphocytes from siblings known to be identical at the major histocompatibility linkage group. In the patients studied, the blast transformation induced by leukemia cells was not detectable when the patient was in remission. Stimulation by leukemia cells also elicited increased responses of the lymphocytes from normal haploidentical siblings, parents, and unrelated individuals as compared to stimulation by normal allogeneic cells or leukemia cells of patients with leukemia in remission. The primed lymphocyte test (PLT) was used successfully to establish HLA-D identity of the leukemia patients and their respective HLA-identical siblings, despite high percentages of circulatory blasts. Utilizing lymphocytes from normal siblings primed against the leukocytes from an HLA-identical sibling with leukemia, we also presented results of PLT's which suggested that the stimulation induced by leukemia cells in MLC was produced by leukemia-associated antigens.