The Rocky Road from Cancer Stem Cell Discovery to Diagnostic Applicability

Similar disparity was seen for CD38 prognostic studies.For example, in 1993, Koehler et al. reported that CD38 expression failed to significantly correlate with the outcomes of 325 patients of childhood acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) (Koehler et al., 1993).In 2000, Keyhani et al. evaluated the levels of CD38 expression in the blasts of 304 AML and 138 ALL patients (Keyhani et al., 2000).Patients with the higher percentages of CD38 + cancer cells had the best outcomes, experiencing both longer times between remission and relapse and improved overall survival.Their results infer that patients with increased CD38 -(LSC marker) cancer cells experienced the worse outcomes.However, lack of CD38 expression was only a significant independent risk factor for the AML patients, not ALL patients.In 2003, Repp et al. assessed the prognostic value of a panel of 33 different CD molecules for AML (Repp et al., 2003).Among the panel, expression of CD38 and CD34 was quantified singly in 783 patient samples.As the CSC theory would predict, patients with increased CD34 expression or decreased CD38 expression had poorer overall outcomes.Other LSC markers have also been tested for their prognostic value individually.In a 1994 immunophenotyping AML prognostic study (Bradstock et al., 1994), LSC proposed markers CD34, c-kit (CD117) and HLA-DR (Blair et al., 1998;Blair and Sutherland, 2000) were among the panel of CD antigens tested.CD34, c-kit and HLA-DR expression failed to correlate with patient outcome (Bradstock et al., 1994).A more recent study concluded that increased c-kit (CD117) expression correlated with worse outcomes for AML patients (Advani et al., 2008).This result was in direct disagreement with the CSC theory since it is the lack of c-kit expression in combination with CD34 expression that was used to identify LSCs (Blair and Sutherland, 2000).The above described studies suggest that the prognostic potential of LSC markers is not promising and clinically irrelevant.However, as discussed below, employed in combination, the prognostic potential of LSC markers becomes more apparent and the results therefore lend support to the CSC theory.In 2005, van Rhenen et al., quantified the frequency of CD34 + CD38 - cancer cells in 92 AML patients at time of diagnosis and reported worse outcomes for patients with increased CD34 + CD38 -cancer cells (van Rhenen A. et al., 2005).Patients with increased CD34 + CD38 -cancer cell frequency (>3.5%) relapsed on average 5.6 months post remission, while patients with lower CD34 + CD38 -cancer frequency relapsed on average 16 months post remission.The prognostic value of CD34 + CD38 -has also been observed in other leukemias.Recently, Ebinger et al. quantified the frequency of CD34 + CD38 -leukemia blasts in 42 childhood ALL cases (Ebinger et al., 2010).The researchers found that increased CD34 + CD38 - cancer cells was associated with increased minimal residual disease and thus poorer prognosis for this leukemia sub-type as well.Although future studies will be required for confirmation, it appears that using the CSC markers in combination is more relevant as a prognostic tool than their application as singly applied markers.Finally, with the more recent discovery that ALDH activity can be used as marker to isolate LSC (Cheung et al., 2007), ALDH activity is also being tested for prognostic value.Cheung et al. reported that increased ALDH activity in AML patient samples correlated significantly with the cytogenetic changes previously associated with unfavourable prognosis (Cheung et al., 2007).In 2009, Ran et al. compared the outcomes of 40 AML patients with higher percentages of ALDH+ cancer cells (>0.36%) to 28 patients with lower frequencies of ALDH+ cells (<0.36%) (Ran et al., 2009).Increased frequency of ALDH + cells correlated significantly with decreased survival probability.We await the results of future studies that will test the prognostic potential of ALDH activity combined with the LSC cell surface markers. How to referenceIn order to correctly reference this scholarly work, feel free to copy and paste the following:

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