Issue Highlights – September 2016

Abstract

This issue of Cytometry Part B: Clinical Cytometry contains nine articles, eight of which examine topics related to hematopoietic neoplasms. NON-NEOPLASTIC T CELLS IN LYMPHOMASAND LEUKEMIAS Three of these manuscripts do not directly study neoplastic cells in patient cohorts but rather present studies of non-neoplastic T cell populations found in patients with lymphoma or leukemia. In one study, Hunt and colleagues (1) describe the use of internal non-neoplastic T cells as controls in the evaluation of T cell neoplasms. The staining patterns of the normal T cells can function as a process control, assuring that all steps of sample preparation, staining, and analysis were performed correctly. Furthermore, with standardization of staining and analysis, these internal T cell can also be used as controls for the assessment of staining intensities in presumptively abnormal T cells. Caveats to this approach included the paucity of some T cell subpopulations in all patients and instrument to instrument variability in measuring staining intensities, highlighting the need for standardization in both staining and instrument set up.In a second study Gunduz et al (2) examined peripheral blood T regulatory (Treg) cells in newly diagnosed lymphoma patients (both Hodgkin and non-Hodgkin). Increasingly, immune regulators and responses in patients with neoplasms are of interest, as these may tell if and how the abnormal cells are escaping immune surveillance. Recent examples include a study of natural killer (NK) cells and NK-like T cell populations in acute myeloid leukemia (3) and a study of memory and na€ ıve T cells in chronic lymphocytic leukemia (4). Several additional studies have examined Treg cells in hematologic neoplasms (5,6). In the current study Gunduz and coworkers look at Tregs (CD41CD25highFoxP31) in the peripheral blood of cohorts of Hodgkin lymphoma (HL) patients, non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL) patients, and healthy subjects and attempt to correlate the number of Tregs with a variety of patient characteristics. While a number of correlations were observed with prognostic factors in both HL and NHL patients, the only correlation observed with survival was in NHL patients where the number of Tregs inversely correlated with overall survival. These results, while preliminary, suggest that immune parameters might be feasible for use as prognostic markers, although much work remains to be done to precise how and why this can be done.In related work, Wu and associates (7) queried whether reactive T cells in lymphocyte rich classical HL, nodular HL and T cell/histiocyte rich large B cell lymphoma could provide information of diagnostic utility. This study builds upon and extends the work of Seegmiller et al in which CD7 overexpressing T cells were identified in infiltrates of classical HL (8). In the current study a variety of phenotypes (T cells, CD4, CD8, B cell, NK cells dual positive CD41CD81, CD7 bright T cells) were examined in the infiltrates of these lymphomas and attempts were made to correlate these with the diag...