Using anti-A and anti-B blood group monoclonal antibodies and fluorescent activated cell sorting of human bone marrow, A (or B) blood group antigen was shown to be on 5.2 +/- 5.9 (mean +/- SD) % of CFU-GEMM and 12.5 +/- 19.6% of the erythroid burst forming cells (designated BFU-GEMM) as defined by the mixed colony assay, and 49.5 +/- 20% of the BFU-E and 83.5 +/- 9.9% of the CFU-E as defined by the erythroid colony assay. This antigen expression on the BFU-GEMM is consistent with the concept that erythroid bursts stimulated by leucocyte conditioned medium are less mature, and are closer in development to the pluripotent stem cell than the BFU-E. These results help to explain the delayed erythropoiesis, and perhaps impaired engraftment of all cell lineages, that may occur in some recipients of ABO incompatible bone marrow transplants with persistent and high anti-A titres.

Platelet-derived growth factor (PDGF) has been shown to stimulate growth of normal and malignant fibroblasts, glial cells and smooth muscle cells. A growth promoting effect on human haemopoietic precursors has also been described, but the interpretation of this haemopoietic proliferative response to PDGF has been hampered by the lack of purity of the target population. In this study we show that PDGF promotes growth of early bone marrow haemopoietic progenitors depleted of either monocytes or T lymphocytes which are known to influence haemopoiesis. Moreover, the action of PDGF is even increased on a highly enriched BI-3C5 early bone marrow population. BI-3C5 is a novel monoclonal antibody which recognizes an antigen present on all multilineage colony-forming cells (CFU-mix) (Tindle et al. 1985). BI-3C5 positively and negatively sorted fractions were obtained by fluorescence activated cell sorting (FACS) and PDGF was found to stimulate growth of CFU-mix in the BI-3C5-positive fraction (consisting of only 4-6% of the marrow population), the effect being more marked than that on unsorted bone marrow. The results suggest that the product of the cellular proto-oncogene c-sis (the putative structural gene for the beta chain of PDGF) may play a regulatory role in the in vivo proliferation of multipotent haemopoietic progenitors.

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Interleukin-6 (IL-6) has been shown to inhibit growth and induce differentiation of several myeloid leukemia cell lines. In this work, two in vivo models of acute myeloid leukemia (AML) in mice have been used to test the therapeutic potential of recombinant human IL-6. In mice inoculated by a transplantable AML tumor, IL-6 injections inhibited the development of leukemia and increased survival. The effect was related to dose and length of treatment. In a model of radiation-induced leukemogenesis in SJL/J mice, administration of low- dose IL-6 for 10 days, 4 months after irradiation, reduced the incidence of leukemia observed during 1 year, whereas granulocyte- macrophage colony-stimulating factor (GM-CSF) increased the incidence of leukemia. In vitro liquid cultures of leukemic blood cells obtained from AML patients showed that IL-6 slowed growth and decreased the proportion of blasts with an increase in more mature myeloid elements in 72% of M1, M2, M4 AML cases. In contrast, GM-CSF less often produced differentiation but stimulated leukemic cell growth in liquid cultures, without synergism by IL-6.

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