Submitted April 12, 2006
Accepted July 9, 2006
Prognostic significance of CD20 expression in childhood B-cell precursor acute lymphoblastic leukemia
Sima Jeha*, Frederick Behm, Deqing Pei, John T Sandlund, Raul C Ribeiro, Bassem I Razzouk, Jeffrey E Rubnitz, Nobuko Hijiya, Scott C Howard, Cheng Cheng, and Ching-Hon Pui
St Jude Children's Hospital Research Hospital, Memphis, Tennessee, USA
* Corresponding author; email: sima.jeha{at}stjude.org.
CD20 expression is associated with inferior survival in adults with ALL. We analyzed the prognostic impact of CD20 expression in 353 children with B-cell precursor ALL treated on three consecutive St. Jude Total Therapy studies. CD20 expression (>20%) was found in 169 patients (48%), and was more frequent in patients between 1 and 10 years of age than in those younger than 1 or older than 10 years (p=0.001). None of 14 patients with MLL-AF4 expressed CD20. There was no association between CD20 expression and E2A-PBX, TEL-AML1, ploidy, WBC at diagnosis, or gender. In contrast to the experience in adult ALL, our patients with CD20 expression tended to have a better treatment outcome than those without the expression: 5-year event free survival 84% ± 2.9% versus 78% ± 3.1% (p=0.08). This data suggest that CD20 expression is not associated with inferior outcome in pediatric patients treated with contemporary regimens.
