A newly developed serum-free culture system: clonal growth of human acute myelogeneous leukemia (AML) progenitors--a report of 14 AML cases.

A new serum-free culture (SFC) system for human AML-CFU was established and the colony-promoting activity of four recombinant human hematopoietic growth factors (rhHGFs) including granulocyte-macrophage colony-stimulating factor (rhGM-CSF), interleukin-3 (rhIL-3), erythropoietin (rhEPO) and newly developed stem cell factor (rhSCF) were investigated in this SFC system. Under the orthogonal design condition, it was found that human AML-CFU presented optimal clonal growth in an environment of bovine serum albumin (0.6%), saturated human transferrin (2 x 10(-6) mol/L), cholesterol (2.8 micrograms/ml), bovine insulin (15 micrograms/ml), bovine hemin (0.05 mmol/L), linoleic acid (2.8 micrograms/ml), and IMDM. Spontaneously growing colonies were observed in 11 out of 14 cases studied. The plating efficiencies obtained by culturing with rhGM-CSF, rhIL-3, and rhSCF were 0.776 +/- 0.621%, 0.574 +/- 0.510%, and 0.647 +/- 0.543% (mean +/- s), respectively. There was one case (M3b) showing no response to all HGFs in both SFC ad SCC. The clonal growth of AML-CFU obtained from peripheral blood of the patient with M6 was unexpectedly marked. As a whole, the newly designed SFC system has been demonstrated to be useful for culture of human AML-CFU from both bone marrow and peripheral blood.