Differential agglutination by soybean agglutinin of human leukemia and neuroblastoma cell lines: potential application to autologous bone marrow transplantation.

Normal human bone marrow cells were mixed with radioactively labeled tumor cells from different leukemia and neuroblastoma cell lines, and the cell mixtures were separated by differential agglutination with soybean agglutinin. It is shown that the cell fraction unagglutinated by soybean agglutinin, which was previously found to be capable of reconstituting the hematopoietic system of lethally irradiated recipients, can be purged of tumor cells with varying efficiency depending on the tumor cell expression of soybean agglutinin receptors as detected by flow cytofluorimetry with fluoresceinated soybean agglutinin.