Nashwa Khairat Abousamra
Mansoura University, Egypt
Title: Impact of ectonucleoside triphosphate diphosphohydrolase-1 on B-chronic lymphocytic leukemia
Biography
Biography: Nashwa Khairat Abousamra
Abstract
B-cell chronic lymphocytic leukemia (B-CLL) is a heterogeneous disease with a wide variability in patients' clinical course. Numerous prognostic markers were introduced to screen for patients likely to have progressive course of B-CLL bearing the potential to facilitate risk-adapted treatment strategies. Extracellular ATP functions as a "natural adjuvant" that boosts immune responses in the tumor micro environment but might also contribute directly to cancer cell death. CD39/ENTPD1 is the dominant ecto nucleotidase catalyzes the sequential hydrolysis of ATP to AMP that is further degraded to adenosine. The present study was conducted to analyze CD39 expression in T cells and B-CLL cells by flow cytometry to evaluate its impact on the clinical course of 68 unselected B-CLL patients and correlate it with well-established risk factors. CD39 expression in T cells was increased in the peripheral blood of B-CLL patients compared to healthy controls. The higher levels were associated with the advanced stage of disease. CD39 expression in T cells negatively interacted with patients' time to first treatment (TFT). Although our results revealed CD39 expression in B-CLL cells as a marker of less aggressive disease, our attempt to correlate its level with TFT failed to give any prognostic relevance. Overall, our data indicate that T-cell CD39 expression may identify subsets of B-CLL patients with unfavorable clinical outcome in term of therapeutic need. Moreover, it can be incorporated into prognostic schema to improve the prediction of disease progression in CLL. CD39 may find utility as a future target for the development of novel therapies with immune-modulating antitumor agents in CLL.