Objective: We observed that ph + ALL patients administrated with recombinant human G-CSF (rhG-CSF) after intense chemotherapy have presented a trend of disease relapse. Thus, we aim to thoroughly investigate the expression and role of GM-CSFR and G-CSFR on ph + ALL patients.
Method: SUP-B15, BALL-1 and primary leukemia cells were used in this study. Transcript levels were analyzed by quantitative PCR while cell viability was measured using a CCK-8 assay. Flow cytometry was used to assess the different stages of cell cycle.
Results: We found that the mRNA expression levels of GM-CSFR and G-CSFR were higher in patients with ph + ALL, as well as in SUP-B15 cells. rhG-CSF was also observed to promote the viability of SUP-B15 cells while inversely inhibiting BALL-1 cell viability. In addition, we also determined that rhG-CSF (100 ng/ml) decreased the sensitivity of SUP-B15 cells to imatinib and nilotinib, while the results were exactly the contrary for dasatinib.
Conclusion: We demonstrated high expression levels of GM-CSFR and G-CSFR, as well as their promotable role for viability in ph + ALL cells. We further found that rhG-CSF influenced the sensitivity of SUP-B15 cells to TKIs.
Keywords: G-CSFR; GM-CSFR; TKI; cell cycle; ph + ALL.