Immunophenotypic subtyping of leukemic cells from Iranian patients with acute lymphoblastic leukaemia: association to disease outcome.

BACKGROUND Immunophenotypic characterization of the leukemic cells has been widely used as a tool for diagnosis, classification, stratification and prognosis of leukaemia. OBJECTIVE To investigate the immunophenotypic subtype profiles of Iranian patients with acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) and its association to disease outcome. METHODS In this study, a total of 60 Iranian patients with ALL were immunophenotyped by flow cytometry using a panel of monoclonal antibodies specific for CD2, CD3, CD5, CD10, CD13, CD14, CD19, CD20, CD33, CD34, CD45, HLA-DR and TdT molecules. RESULTS The samples were initially categorized into T-ALL (n=9), B-ALL (n=50) and mixed lineage (n=1) based on the expression patterns of CD3 and CD19 molecules. B-ALL patients could further be classified into four subtypes, including Pro-B (n=7, 11.7%), Pre-B I (n=28, 46.7%), Pre-B II (n=13, 21.7%) and immature/mature B cells (n=2, 3.3%) on the basis of expression of CD10, CD19, CD20, HLA-DR and TdT. Clinical manifestations and laboratory findings of the patients did not reveal association with immunophenotypic subtypes of ALL, with the exception of mediastinal mass and WBC count at the time of diagnosis which were found to be significantly higher in patients with T-ALL compared with B-ALL (p=0.001 and 0.014), respectively. CONCLUSION Our results indicate that overall the immunophenotypic profile of Iranian ALL patients is similar to previous reports and it might be used for monitoring of minimal residual disease and prognosis.