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 sub-types of all, with the exception of mediastinal mass and wbc count at the time of diag-nosis 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.