To the editor—We note the paper of Agrawal et al.1 which, in contradiction to our earlier report (Gimmi et al., ref. 2), could not find evidence of MUC 1-induced apoptosis of T cells.
Prior to the Agrawal et al. publication, one of the authors of Gimmi et al. reported that he was unable to reproduce the apoptosis finding and indicated that a colleague in another institution had also failed to reproduce that finding. In view of the significance of this disagreement, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute appointed an internal committee of experienced immunologists to examine our paper and define an appropriate action. The committee recommended that the Nadler laboratory repeat the apoptosis experiments that it had previously performed. These new experiments were carefully supervised and reviewed, and they showed that neither purified MUC 1 nor stable transfectants expressing MUC 1 cDNA caused detectable apoptosis. Hence we agree with Agrawal et al. that apoptosis is not involved in MUC 1 induced T cell dysfunction.
We do not know why our previously reported results were wrong and regret the confusion that we have caused in the scientific literature. The role of MUC 1 in cancer cell biology remains obscure.
References
Agrawal, B, Krantz, M.J., Reddish, M.A. & Longenecker, B.M. Cancer-associated MUC1 mucin inhibits human T-cell proliferation, which is reversible by IL-2. Nature Med. 4, 43– 49 (1998).
Gimmi, C.D. et al. Breast cancer-associated antigen, DF3/MUC1, induces apoptosis of activated human T cells. Nature Med. 2, 1367–1370 (1996).
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Boussiotis, V., Freeman, G., Gribben, J. et al. No evidence for MUC 1-induced apoptosis. Nat Med 4, 1093 (1998). https://doi.org/10.1038/2580
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/2580
