Oct 23, 2013 - Chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) is characterized by progressive hypogammaglobulinemia predisposing affected patients to a variety of ...
Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia Patients Have a Preserved Cytomegalovirus-Specific Antibody Response despite Progressive Hypogammaglobulinemia Katrina Vanura1, Franz Rieder2, Marie-Theres Kastner2, Julia Biebl2, Michael Sandhofer2, Trang Le1, Robert Strassl3, Elisabeth Puchhammer-Stöckl3, Thomas Perkmann4, Christoph F. Steininger2, Kostas Stamatopoulos5, Wolfgang Graninger2, Ulrich Jäger1, Christoph Steininger2* 1 Department of Medicine I, Div. of Hematology and Hemostaseology, Comprehensive Cancer Center (CCC), Medical University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria, 2 Department of Medicine I, Div. of Infectious Diseases and Tropical Medicine, Medical University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria, 3 Department of Virology, Medical University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria, 4 Department of Laboratory Medicine, Medical University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria, 5 Hematology Department and HCT Unit, G. Papanicolaou Hospital, Thessaloniki, Greece
Abstract Chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) is characterized by progressive hypogammaglobulinemia predisposing affected patients to a variety of infectious diseases but paradoxically not to cytomegalovirus (CMV) disease. Moreover, we found reactivity of a panel of CLL recombinant antibodies (CLL-rAbs) encoded by a germ-line allele with a single CMV protein, pUL32, despite differing antibody binding motifs. To put these findings into perspective, we studied prospectively relative frequency of viremia, kinetics of total and virus-specific IgG over time, and UL32 genetic variation in a cohort of therapy-naive patients (n=200). CMV-DNA was detected in 3% (6/200) of patients. The decay of total IgG was uniform (mean, 0.03; SD, 0.03) and correlated with that of IgG subclasses 1-4 in the paired samples available (n=64; p
