Antibodies to human T-cell leukemia virus-membrane antigens in macaques with malignant lymphoma.

Gallo and co-workers first described human T-cell leukemia virus (HTL V), a type C retrovirus isolated from an aggressive case of cutaneous T-cell lymphoma [27, 28]. Cases of adult T-cell leukemia/lymphoma (A1LL) , a unique mature T-cell malignancy, have also yielded numerous other isolates of H1LV [23, 7, 17, 35, 10, 29]. ATLL is seen at increased levels in southwestern Japan and the Caribbean, where seroepidemiologic studies have linked this tumor with H1L V type I. In such endemic regions, natural antibodies can be demonstrated in 4%-37% of the healthy adults whereas more than 90% of patients with ATLL have antibodies to HTLV (11, 31, 1, 32, 5, 20]. The prevalence of H1L V antibodies in healthy individuals is less than 1 % in nonendemic areas [12, 6, 5, 20, 3, 4]. Miyoshi and his colleagues set the precedent for the nonhuman primate studies in 1982, when they demonstrated the presence of antibodies to HTLV in Japanese macaques (Macaca fuscata) by fixed-cell immunofluorescence [24]. Numerous studies since that time have identified antibodies to HTL V in other species of the genus Macaca as well as many Mrican Old World primates. However, serological surveys by several investigators have not de-