AIDS and non-AIDS diffuse large B-cell lymphomas express different antigen profiles

Abstract

Based on gene expression profiling, diffuse large B-cell lymphomas arising in immunocompetent patients can be divided into germinal center and activated B-cell types. Since little is known about acquired immunodeficiency syndrome associated diffuse large B-cell lymphomas, we tested whether the protein expression of germinal center and activated B-cell markers differed between acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) vs non-AIDS diffuse large B-cell lymphomas. We immunohistochemically stained tissue microarrays of 39 de novo diffuse large B-cell lymphomas: 12 AIDS associated and 27 non-AIDS, with germinal center (BCL6, CD10, CyclinH) and activated B-cell markers (MUM1, CD138, PAK1, CD44, BCL2). We scored each case for percent positive cells (0-19% ¼ 0; 20-49% ¼ 1; 50-100% ¼ 2). The activated B-cell and germinal center summation scores of each case were used as (x, y) coordinate data points to construct two-dimensional contour-frequency plots. The contour plot of non-AIDS diffuse large B-cell lymphomas showed two distinct clusters: a cluster with a high germinal center phenotype (cluster 1) and a cluster with a high activated B-cell phenotype (cluster 3). In contrast, the AIDS-related diffuse large B-cell lymphomas formed a single aggregate (cluster 2) (P ¼ 0.02, Fisher exact test). When the contour plots of the AIDS-related and the non-AIDS cases were superimposed, cluster 2 of the AIDS cases expressed an intermediate germinal center/activated B-cell phenotype compared to clusters 1 and 3 of the non-AIDS diffuse large B-cell lymphomas. Our results confirm that non-AIDS diffuse large B-cell lymphomas segregate into two groups with either germinal center or activated B-cell phenotype. We report the new finding that the AIDS status of the patient predicts the immunophenotype of the diffuse large B-cell lymphomas. We also describe a novel method for displaying immunohistochemical expression data using twodimensional contour-frequency plots. Materials and methods Lymphoma SamplesWe performed a retrospective study of 56 diffuse large B-cell lymphomas (23 AIDS-related and 33 non-AIDS) that were retrieved from the archives of

Expression of immunohistochemical markers in patients with AIDS-related lymphoma

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Primary testicular diffuse large B-cell lymphoma belongs to the nongerminal center B-cell-like subgroup: a study of 18 cases

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Large Cell Lymphoma: Correlation of HIV Status and Prognosis with Differentiation Profiles Assessed by Immunophenotyping

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