Figure 6.

Leukemia initiating cells are within the CD34⁺ compartment of acute myeloid leukemia with inv(16). (A) Experimental setup to analyze CD34⁺ versus CD34⁻ blasts in AML with inv(16). (B, C) Functional analyses of sorted CD34⁺ versus CD34⁻ AML with inv(16) blasts revealed that CD34⁺ subsets are enriched for cells with in vitro colony-forming capacity (B) and contain in vivo engrafting LIC. Kaplan-Meier survival analysis indicating survival differences in mice transplanted with non-leukemogenic CD34⁻ blasts versus leukemia-inducing CD34⁺ blasts (C); (red: CD34⁺ blasts (engraftable); gray: CD34⁻ blasts (non-engraftable) of the same patient in each panel; patients #8 and #16; five transplanted mice per condition, 1×10⁶ transplanted cells/mouse). For colony-forming unit (CFU) counts, three biological replicates performed on samples from patients #8 and #16 are shown. (D) Enrichment plot of a common LIC-gene signature⁴ in gene expression profiles of CD34⁺ versus CD34⁻ blasts from two inv(16) AML cases (patients #8 and #16) indicating a common gene signature in both comparisons (left) and a heatmap of the CD34⁺ versus CD34⁻ gene signatures in AML with inv(16) (right). NES denotes normalized enrichment score.