Monitoring the Antileukemic Immune Response with an Active Specific Immunization Strategy

Donor lymphocyte transfusion (DLT) may induce the graft-versus-leukemia (GVL) effect for patients with AML relapsed after transplant. However, the limited overall efficacy of DLT in clinical practice emphasizes the importance of identifying a specific subgroup of patients who might benefit from this treatment approach.

To monitor the cellular immune response after DLT, we developed an active specific immunization strategy using in vitro generated AML-trained T cells to induce a highly specific antileukemic T-cell response and thus established a novel nonradioactive assay system.

The myeloid blasts derived from five patients with AML relapsed post allogeneic hematopoietic stem cell transplantation (allo-HSCT) were first labeled with CFDA (5,6-carboxyfluorescein diacetate succinimidyl ester). To analyze the growth inhibitory potential of the donor T cells trained by AML cells, the myeloid blasts were induced to proliferate by means of a cytokine cocktail. The T cell mediated growth inhibitory potential was detected after 5 days by flow cytometry and correlated with [3H]-thymidine uptake.

Here, we applied a CFDA dye to track the proliferation and expansion of AML blasts in response to the cytokine cocktail in vitro. AML-trained T cells, expressed high levels of the activation markers CD25 and CD69, and were generated to recognize the leukemic progenitor cells and inhibit cytokine-induced leukemic cell proliferation, which is an active specific immunization strategy circumventing the identification of leukemia-associated antigens. The capability of proliferation inhibition of AML-trained T cells evaluated with the nonradioactive, CFDA-based assay provided comparable results with the classic [3H]-thymidine assay.

The active specific immunization strategy was realized to monitor the antileukemic immune response measured with radioactive and nonradioactive assay system.

No relevant conflicts of interest to declare.