Circulating T cells derived from acute leukemia patients with severe therapy-induced cytopenia express a wide range of chemokine receptors.

Normal T cells can mediate antileukemic reactivity after allogeneic stem cell transplantation and T cell targeting immunotherapy is now considered for patients receiving conventional chemotherapy. This antileukemic reactivity is most effective in patients with a low leukemia cell burden, and this burden is expected to be lowest early after transplantation/chemotherapy when patients are cytopenic. Local T cell recruitment will then be essential for the efficiency of the antileukemic response. In this context, the authors compared the chemokine receptor expression for T cells derived from healthy individuals and acute myelogenous leukemia patients with therapy-induced cytopenia after conventional chemotherapy or allogeneic stem cell transplantation. Circulating CD3(+) T cells showed the same chemokine receptor expression for all three groups: CCR1(low), CCR2(low), CCR3(low), CCR4(intermediate), CCR5(intermediate), CCR7(low/intermediate), CXCR2(low), CXCR3(intermediate), and CXCR4(high). Thus, only minor differences between the groups were observed when comparing individual receptors, and we therefore conclude that the chemokine receptor profiles of circulating CD3(+) T cells show no qualitative and only minor quantitative differences for these three groups.