Hairy cell leukemia in kidney transplantation: lesson from a rare disorder.

We report here on the diagnosis and successful treatment of a case of hairy cell leukemia (HCL) that arose 15 years after kidney transplantation in a 51-year-old patient. As soon as the diagnosis was made, HCL was treated with 2-CDA, obtaining complete hematological remission. Immunosuppression with the calcineurin inhibitor cyclosporin was maintained, and the graft was preserved. In kidney transplant recipients supported with immunosuppressive drugs, post-transplant lymphoproliferative diseases (PTLDs) are frequent and typically related to immunosuppression via a loss of control of infectious/EBV-related proliferative stimuli. To date, HCL has not been considered among PTLDs. Recently, however, the oncogenic mutation V600E of the BRAF protein kinase has been found to be a hallmark of HCL, and calcineurin inhibitors have been shown to interfere with signaling downstream of V600E BRAF early on by counteracting senescence-associated mechanisms that protect against the oncogenic potential of the mutated kinase. Such a biochemical link between the oncogene-dependent signaling and calcineurin inhibitor activities suggests that HCL in transplanted patients might be a peculiar type of PTLD based on the presence of a specific mutation. This mechanism might also be involved in other neoplasias bearing the same or similar mutations, such as melanoma and non-melanoma skin cancer

Proteomic analysis of lymphoid and haematopoietic neoplasms: There's more than biomarker discovery

Lymphoid and haematopoietic neoplasms comprise a broad spectrum of different tumours, classified by the World Health Organization (WHO) on the basis of a combination of morphology, immunophenotypic, genetic and clinical features. Up to date for many of these neoplasms no single feature is regarded as a diagnostic gold standard. The application of proteomics to the study of neoplastic haematological diseases could help in the search for new diagnostic and prognostic markers, as well as in the development of new therapeutic strategies. In this review, we focus on the actual role of proteomics technologies in the study of neoplastic haematology. In particular, we analyse the results obtained in the field of body fluid, cell lines, and tissues proteomics, and discuss the improvement allowed by the new developed proteomic strategies, such as nanofluidic systems, analysis of formalin-fixed tissues, and quantitative high throughput techniques (SILAC, ICAT, iTRAQ)

Mantle cell lymphoma cell lines show no evident immunoglobulin heavy chain stereotypy but frequent light chain stereotypy

Mantle cell lymphoma shows a peculiar immunogenetic profile, but the functional consequences of this fact are unknown. We have determined the precise sequences of rearranged heavy and light chain genes in several mantle cell lymphoma cell lines and investigated the presence of heavy and light chain stereotypy. These cell lines use IGHV and IGLV genes that are known to be preferentially rearranged in mantle cell lymphoma, but we found no evidence of heavy chain stereotypy. On the contrary, one cell line (Mino) showed a nearly identical light chain complementarity determining region 3 when compared to the only published light chain cluster. Two cell lines couples (Jeko-1/UPN-2 and JVM-2/JVM-13) showed a highly similar light chain, which satisfied the criteria for stereotypy. Our data show that mantle cell lymphoma cell lines resemble the IGHV and IGLV usage of mantle cell lymphoma, and foster the hypothesis that light chain stereotypy might be under-recognized

Recurrence of severe low back pain due to myeloproliferative disorder in a patient affected by seronegative spondyloarthropathy

Letter to the Edito