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¹ Department of Bioimmunotherapy, University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, TX and ² Department of Cell Biology, University of Torino, Torino, Italy

Requests for Reprints: Kapil Mehta, Department of Bioimmunotherapy, Unit 422, University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, 1515 Holcombe Boulevard, Houston, TX 77030. Phone: (713) 792-8140; Fax: (713) 745-4167; E-mail: kmehta{at}mdanderson.org

A major obstacle in the successful delivery of antibody-based therapeutics to tumor cells is the heterogeneity of target antigen expression. We reported previously that retinoic acid (RA) is a potent and selective inducer of the cell-surface antigen CD38 in myeloid leukemia cells. The purpose of this study was to determine whether the RA-induced CD38 antigen could be a target for an anti-CD38-based immunotoxin to induce selective killing of leukemia cells. The combination of RA and the anti-CD38 gelonin immunotoxin induced a synergistic killing of leukemia cells. Thus, coculture of myeloid leukemia cells and cell lines with as little as 1 nM RA in the presence of immunotoxin induced substantial killing (>90%) of leukemia cell clones. More importantly, the blasts of myeloid leukemia patients, irrespective of their morphological and phenotypic features, also responded to the RA and immunotoxin combination when cultured ex vivo. A similar synergistic effect between RA and immunotoxin was observed against a multidrug-resistant variant subline of HL-60 cells. However, another variant of HL-60 cells, HL-60R, in which the retinoid receptor function has been abrogated by a trans-dominant-negative mutation, exhibited complete resistance to the immunotoxin-induced killing effect in the presence or absence of RA. Our results suggest that RA combined with anti-CD38-based therapeutic agent may offer exciting opportunities for the treatment of myeloid leukemias despite their multiplicity of genetic and clinical varieties.

The costs of publication of this article were defrayed in part by the payment of page charges. This article must therefore be hereby marked advertisement in accordance with 18 U.S.C. Section 1734 solely to indicate this fact.

Received 10/23/03; revised 12/30/03; accepted 1/16/04.

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