Anti-mitosin antibodies in a patient with chronic graft-versus-host disease after allogeneic bone marrow transplantation.

In a patient undergoing allogeneic BMT for ALL, chronic GVHD (cGVHD) with skin changes developed within 110 days after transplantation. One year post-BMT, anti-nuclear antibodies were detected. The patient's serum was used for immunoscreening of a HeLa cDNA library. Ten different overlapping positive clones were found to be partial clones of mitosin, a 350-kDa nuclear phosphoprotein which shows a speckled nuclear distribution in S phase and which relocates to the centromere and mitotic apparatus in M phase. Although autoantibodies against centromere protein-F, which is very similar to mitosin, have been reported in patients with cancer, this is the first report of autoantibodies against mitosin in a patient with cGVHD.