OBJECTIVE To study the clinical and pathologic features of 4 cases of the so-called blastic natural killer (NK)-cell lymphoma, with reference to the 2008 WHO classification of tumours of haematopoietic and lymphoid tissues. METHODS The clinical, pathologic and immunohistochemical findings (EliVision method) of 4 cases of blastic NK-cell lymphoma (previously diagnosed according to the 2001 WHO...

Chimeric antigen receptor (CAR)-modified T-cell adoptive immunotherapy is a remarkable therapeutic option proven effective in the treatment of hematological malignancies. In order to optimize cell manufacturing, we sought to develop a novel clinical-grade protocol to obtain CAR-modified cytokine-induced killer cells (CIKs) using the Sleeping Beauty (SB) transposon system. Administration of irra...

Dear Editor, We are grateful to Dr. Chirumbolo for the letter in response to our paper describing a basophil activation test for chronic urticaria [1, 2]. We agree with most of the issues raised by Dr. Chirumbolo, but some points need to be addressed. The non-atopic donors in our study were adults, not infants. Among 3-5 healthy individuals with blood group O, one with a high basophil count was...

BACKGROUND Distinction between mature B-cell neoplasms can be difficult due to overlapping of immunologic features and clinical manifestations. This study investigated whether quantifying mean fluorescence intensity of four monoclonal antibodies in a flow cytometry panel is useful for the differential diagnosis and characterization of these disorders. METHODS The expressions of CD52, CD200, C...

Little is known about the presence of dendritic cells in the human CNS. To investigate the occurrence of dendritic cells in the CSF, paired blood/CSF samples from patients with multiple sclerosis, acute optic neuritis, Lyme neuroborreliosis, other inflammatory neurological diseases and non-inflammatory neurological diseases were examined using flow cytometry. Almost all CSF samples contained my...

Blastic plasmacytoid dendritic cell neoplasm (BPDCN) is a rare hematological malignancy. Plasmacytoid DCs (pDCs), which are defined as lineage marker (Lin)(-)HLA-DR(+)CD56(-)CD123(+)CD11c(-) cells, are considered to be the normal counterpart of BPDCNs. However, BPDCN can be distinguished from pDCs by uniform expression of CD56. In this study, to identify a normal counterpart of BPDCN, we search...

To date, the major target of biologic therapeutics in systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) has been the B cell, which produces pathogenic autoantibodies. Recently, targeting type I IFN, which is elaborated by plasmacytoid dendritic cells (pDCs) in response to endosomal TLR7 and TLR9 stimulation by SLE immune complexes, has shown promising results. pDCs express high levels of the IL-3Rα chain (CD1...

Dendritic cell (DC) defects are an important component of immunosuppression in cancer. Here, we assessed whether cancer could affect circulating DC populations and its correlation with tumor progression. The blood DC compartment was evaluated in 136 patients with breast cancer, prostate cancer, and malignant glioma. Phenotypic, quantitative, and functional analyses were performed at various sta...