Production of colony-stimulating activity by circulating leukocytes from patients with chronic myeloid leukemia at various phases of the disease

The production of colony-stimulating activity (CSA) by peripheral blood leukocytes (PBL) from 107 patients with chronic myeloid leukemia (CML), 58 at diagnosis, 34 during hematological remission, 33 in relapse from hematological control, 39 in accelerated phase, and 28 in blast phase, was measured in the double-layer agar culture system using normal nonadherent bone marrow cells as the source of CFU-GM. The median CSA levels in various stages decreased to 28-60% of control, whereas in hematological remission, there was a normalization of CSA. Five fractionation experiments using monocytes as feeder layers did not show CSA production in untreated CML. The leukemic PBL of 6 patients in blast crisis had no apparently inhibitory effect on colony formation stimulated by normal PBL. There was no correlation between the CSA of PBL and the number of CFU-GM in their bone marrow or peripheral blood at different disease states. Likewise, we failed to find a relationship between the PBL CSA levels and the total WBC counts or the differential counts in the peripheral blood as well as in the feeder layers. Our study indicated that circulating leukocytes from patients with CML at various phases except in hematological remission produce less CSA, which is not attributed to a low number of monocytes or the inhibitory effects of leukemic cells.