Transplantation of marrow cells from children with standard risk-acute lymphoblastic leukemia at the end of therapy into NOD/SCID mice for detecting residual leukemic cells with in vivo growth potential.

In the present work, we developed a strategy for detecting residual leukemia in the marrow of children with standard risk-acute lymphoblastic leukemia (sr-ALL) at the end of therapy, based on the capacity of human leukemic cells for growing in the NOD/SCID mice marrow microenvironment. Mononuclear (MN) marrow cells from 62 patients were injected into sublethally irradiated NOD/SCID mice and the engraftment kinetics and composition of the human grafts were determined periodically. The presence of human leukemic cells with immunophenotypes and clonal DNA markers similar to those of the original leukemic clone was studied.