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DD Ross, BW Thompson, CC Joneckis, SA Akman and CA Schiffer
The dose-response relationship between extracellular concentration of
cytosine arabinoside (ara-C) and intracellular formation of the putative
active metabolites of ara-C [ara-C incorporation into DNA and intracellular
pools of ara-C in triphosphate form (ara-CTP)] was investigated in blast
cells obtained from patients with acute nonlymphocytic leukemia (ANLL) by
exposing these cells in vitro to 10, 100, or 1,000 nmol/L of ara-C. We
studied 23 untreated patients who subsequently achieved complete remission
(CR) with a regimen using daunorubicin and conventional doses of ara-C
(ara-C-sensitive group), and 30 patients judged to be ara-C-resistant
either by failing initial induction therapy (16 patients) or by having
relapsed on an ara-C- containing maintenance regimen (14 patients). In both
patient groups, ara-C incorporation into DNA and intracellular ara-CTP both
displayed statistically significant increases in response to increasing
extracellular concentrations of ara-C (P = .0001 in both cases), with the
rate of increase of ara-CTP greater than that of ara-C incorporation.
Moreover, blast cells from all patients, even those who were most
clinically resistant to ara-C, were able to form ara-CTP and to incorporate
ara-C into DNA. Each tenfold increment in extracellular ara-C concentration
caused an 8.5-fold increase in ara-CTP, but only a 3.6-fold increase in
ara-C incorporation into DNA. Thus, the efficiency of incorporation of
ara-C into DNA (defined as the ratio of ara-C incorporation to ara-CTP
pools) decreased by 58% with each tenfold increment in the extracellular
concentration of ara-C (P less than .0001), presumably as a result of the
inhibitory effect of ara-CTP on DNA polymerase. Using an analysis of
covariance, modest differences were found in the levels of the ara-C
metabolite variables in the ara-C- sensitive group as compared with the
resistant group. However, because there was considerable overlap in ara-C
metabolite formation among the patient groups, it was not possible to
predict clinical outcome by these in vitro assessments of ara-C metabolism.
This article has been cited by other articles:
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| Copyright © 1986 by American Society of Hematology Online ISSN: 1528-0020 | |||||||||