Impact of the functional CD5 polymorphism A471V on the response of chronic lymphocytic leukaemia to conventional chemotherapy regimens.

The CD5 lymphocyte receptor -a immunohistochemical marker of chronic lymphocytic leukaemia (CLL) cells- is a negative regulator of activation signals from the antigen-specific B-cell receptor (BCR). Given that signalling components of the BCR are important contributors to the variable clinical behaviour of CLL, the relevance of functional variants of CD5 on CLL prognosis was explored. The results show that germline-encoded variants influence the survival to conventional chemotherapies from CLL patients with unmutated genes.

Evolutionary and functional evidence for positive selection at the human CD5 immune receptor gene.

CD5 is a lymphocyte surface coreceptor of still incompletely understood function. Currently available information indicates that CD5 participates not only in cell-to-cell immune interactions through still poorly defined endogenous ligands expressed on hemopoietic and nonhemopoietic cells but also in recognition of exogenous and highly conserved microbial structures such as fungal β-glucans. Preceding single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) data analysis provided evidence for a recent selective sweep in East Asia and suggested a nonsynonymous substitution at position 471 (A471V; rs2229177) of the cytoplasmatic region of the CD5 receptor as the most plausible target of selection.