Patients with acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) have an unusually high incidence of B cell lymphomas carrying a t(8; 14) translocation. The appearance of these B cell lymphomas is preceded by lymphnode follicular hyperplasia. However, at present, lymphnode biopsies taken from AIDS patients at an early stage of the disease are of little predictive value for the development of lymphomas because very little is known about the etiology of the hyperplastic follicles or the relationship between the hyperplastic state and the development of lymphomas. The objective of this proposal is to analyze the pathogenesis of follicular hyperplasias in AIDS patients to identify the factors associated with tumor progression and to test the hypothesis that oncogene rearrangements may be already present in the hyperplastic follicles. Cells form individual hyperplastic follicles and progressive lymphomas obtained form lymphnodes of AIDS patients will be analyzed: i) to determine the clonality of hyperplastic follicles and their relationship to other follicles and lymphomas in the same patient utilizing the method of CDRIII-PCR. ii) to determine whether rearrangements or mutations of the cellular proto-oncogenes c-myc and bcl-2 are present in hyperplastic follicles preceding the development of lymphomas. The findings will be correlated with the presence or absence of HTLV-I, human herpes virus-6 and Epstein-Barr virus sequences and with the maturational stages of the targets of transformation, the B-lymphocytes.
| Press, R D; Reddy, E P; Ewert, D L (1994) Overexpression of C-terminally but not N-terminally truncated Myb induces fibrosarcomas: a novel nonhematopoietic target cell for the myb oncogene. Mol Cell Biol 14:2278-90 |
| Fynan, E F; Ewert, D L; Block, T M (1993) Latency and reactivation of Marek's disease virus in B lymphocytes transformed by avian leukosis virus. J Gen Virol 74 ( Pt 10):2163-70 |
| Eguchi, Y; Ewert, D L; Tsujimoto, Y (1992) Isolation and characterization of the chicken bcl-2 gene: expression in a variety of tissues including lymphoid and neuronal organs in adult and embryo. Nucleic Acids Res 20:4187-92 |
| Fynan, E; Block, T M; DuHadaway, J et al. (1992) Persistence of Marek's disease virus in a subpopulation of B cells that is transformed by avian leukosis virus, but not in normal bursal B cells. J Virol 66:5860-6 |
