الفهرس | Only 14 pages are availabe for public view |
Abstract Acute myeloid leukemia (AML) is a heterogeneous disorder with treatment results much inferior to acute lymphoblastic leukemia. Treatment failure is largely attributed to the persistence of leukemia stem cells (LSCs) which are less accessible and hence less responsive to chemo-therapeutics. The classical LSCs phenotype is CD34 + / CD38-; however LSCs express other markers especially CD123 and CD133 which may be even earlier than CD34. We hypothesized that that CD123 and CD133 may be better markers of LSCs and that the more the number of LSCs at diagnosis /and or at follow up periods, the more the case would be resistant to therapy. The purpose of this study was to test the efficiency of various antibodies separately or in combinations to characterize LSCs and, if possible, to discriminate them from normal hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs). We aimed thereafter to demonstrate the impact of LSCs frequency at diagnosis and at follow up periods as compared to minimal residual disease (MRD) on overall survival (OS), disease free survival (DFS). We aimed lastly to study the relationship between MRD and LSCs frequency at follow up periods to verify which will be better correlated to outcome |