Immunophenotyping of blast crisis during the chronic myelogenous leukemia

Chronic myelogenous leukemia (CML) is a clonal myeloproliferative disorder of hematopoietic stem cells (P.G. Fialkov, 1981; R. P. Gale, 1991). CML initially presents chronic phase (CP), than it progresses into an accelerated phase (AP) and finishes as a rule by blast crisis (BC). The patients with BC have a lower response rate to the modern chemotherapy. However, the survival very various among different patients (N.M.Kantaijean, 1989). So this makes some prerequisites for the investigation of clinical, cytological and immunophenotypical characteristics and their influences on prognosis. It was shown that the blast cells are very heterogeneous (Janossy G et al, 1976; Baryshnikov AYu et al, 1989; Valeron O et al, 1989). It involves the myeloid, erythroid, megakaryocyte and lymphoid precursors. As blast cells have some differences, there were some attempts to describe clinical variants of blast crisis (Janossy G. et al. , 1979).These investigations were not very successful because of lack of monoclonal antibodies, which could permit characterization of human hematopoietic progenitor cells. But now owing to hybridoma technology is a number of monoclonal antibodies by means which it is possible to characterize surface antigen markers of hematopoietic cells and identify their belonging to some of the lines of these cells. In this study, we investigated the immunological phenotype of blastcells from patients BC disease, determined the subpopulations of blast cells and its modification duringtherapy, estimated the significance of immunophenotype blast cells for prognosis in CML.