Philadelphia chromosome-positive myeloid cells in the peripheral blood of chronic myelogenous leukemia patients: comparison with the frequency detected in cycling cells of the bone marrow.

Monitoring the frequency of the Philadelphia (Ph) chromosome in chronic myelogenous leukemia (CML) is important in determining the effectiveness of treatment for patients during therapy. This can be done with high resolution by subjecting short-term bone marrow cultures (48 h) to 24 h of mitotic arrest before harvest and detecting Ph-positive (Ph+) metaphases by fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH) in a procedure termed hypermetaphase FISH or HMF. Here, we compared procedures for detecting Ph+ interphase cells (interphase FISH or I-FISH) in peripheral blood polymorphonucleocytes (PMNs) with HMF results on the bone marrow of the same 26 CML patients in different stages of remission. The probes for I-FISH in these experiments were relatively large (200-300 kb) and sufficiently resolved in PMNs so that 97.5% of the cells were scorable. The correlation between the frequencies of Ph+ cells from the two different cell sources was excellent (r = 0.983, P < 0.0001); however, there was a consistently higher level of Ph+ cells observed in the cycling marrow cells than in the peripheral blood PMNs. This was discussed in terms of current theories of apoptosis in CML cells. The large number of PMNs analyzable by I-FISH (approximately 500/patient in this study) provided sufficiently narrow 99% confidence intervals to suggest the procedure as an effective and efficient method for monitoring the frequency of Ph+ cells in CML patients undergoing therapy. However, for detection and quantification of minimal residual disease, HMF is preferable to I-FISH because of the much lower frequency of false-positive readings with the former procedure.