Efficacy and toxicity of 9-beta-D-arabinofuranosylguanine (araG) as an agent to purge malignant T cells from murine bone marrow: application to an in vivo T-leukemia model.

9-β-D-Arabinofuranosylguanine (araG), an analog of deoxyguanosine which is not degraded by purine nucleoside phosphorylase, has been previously shown in in vitro studies by our laboratory to be effective in purging malignant T cells from human bone marrow (1). We now describe studies in a murine model of T-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) in which we tested whether bone marrow, contaminated with malignant T cells and purged ex vivo with araG, could reconstiture both the lymphoid and myeloerythroid lineages in the absence of leukemic relapse