Tissue organisation and cellular composition (toponomics) of follicular lymphoma

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Follicular lymphoma (FL) is one of the rare lymphomas presenting with a secondary architecture. The lymphoma cells do not grow chaotically, but in histologically recognizable structures (follicles). In contrast to epithelial tumors, such a secondary architecture constitutes an exception among lymphoid neoplasias. It is probably induced by the microenvironment, which consists of non-neoplastic T-cells and dendritic cells. Gene-expression analyses have shown an association between the microenvironment and the clinical course of the disease. A deeper understanding of how the microenvironment interacts with lymphoma cells and how the prognostic gene-expression signatures could be translated into immunohistochemical surrogate markers is lacking so far. There are no adequate cell-lines and animal models available for FL. Within this project we plan to analyse the complex architecture and the cellular composition of FL by the means of fluorescence multi-staining and digital image analysis. Innovative histological parameters are obtained to re-interprete available gene-expression data.