Failure to demonstrate immunity to leukemia associated antigens by lymphocyte transformation in vitro

In vitro autologous blast cell sensitization as immunotherapy in acute non-lymphocytic leukemia

“…Like Schweitzer [18] we failed to confirm a response in vitro to autologous blast cells. This response might be improved by the presence of cross-reactive alloantigens [23] or by coupling an antigen, such as PPD [10], onto the blast cells.…”

Humoral and Cellular Immunity Against Allogeneic Antigens in Patients with Acute Leukaemia

“…The MCC response was also found positive in only 1 patient. Our results seem to agree with those published by Schweitzer et al [13] who concluded that MCC was unsuitable for the detection of immunity against leukaemia-associated antigens; in fact, they described that the in creased thymidine incorporation occasional ly observed in mixed cultures of leukaemia cells and remission lymphocytes could not be distinguished from non-specific thymi dine incorporation as was shown to occur sometimes in unstimulated cultures. Howev er, a recent publication [14] showed a sig nificant autologous stimulation with an ear ly peak response at 48-72 h in 2 of 6 AML patients tested.…”

“…Stimulation of remission lymphocytes by autologous blasts has been reported by some authors [3,10,14,16], while others [13] failed to demon strate this phenomenon. Antibodies against either autologous or allogeneic blast cells have been found in the sera of leukaemic patients [2,6].…”

Response of remission lymphocytes to autochthonous leukaemic myeloblasts

“…Moreover, Char et al (1973) showed that autochthonous blast cell membrane extracts induced skin reactivity in AML patients more frequently than allogeneic extracts. Lymphocyte responses to acute-phase AML blasts do not, in our opinion, represent nonspecific thymidine incorporation as suggested by Schweitzer et al (1973) The antigens of autochthonous leukaemic blasts causing lymphocyte stimulation have never been identified, the reason undoubtedly being the difficulty in identifying the specificity of the clone of responding lymphocytes. Although an intact and viable cell may be necessary to induce a lymphocyte response, there are difficulties in using untreated stimulating blasts, firstly because spontaneous DNA synthesis in the control cultures may mask specific stimulation, and secondly because any allogeneic leucocytes in the stimulating cell preparation may induce a two-way MLC reaction, though careful checking of the treatment of patients before obtaining the autochthonous blasts can often exclude this difficulty.…”

“…The evidence of such antigens specific to human leukaemic cells is based largely on observations that DNA synthesis by lymphocytes from patients in remission is stimulated by autochthonous acute-phase leukaemic blasts (Fridman and Kourilsky, 1969;Viza et al, 1969;Powles et al, 1971) though the existence of such antigens on lymphoblastic leukaemic cells using this test has been disputed (Schweitzer, Melief and Eijsvoogel, 1973).…”