The Discrimination Between CD8+ Cytotoxic and CD8+ Suppressor Lymphocyte Subsets Within Cutaneous Infiltrates

To the Editor.—  I was very interested to read the article by Paller et al, entitled "T-lymphocyte Subsets in the Lesional Skin of Allogeneic and Autologous Bone Marrow Transplant Patients," that was published in the December 1988 issue of the Archives.¹ In fact, the possibility of discriminating between one another the two main subclasses of CD8+ lymphocytes, namely, the CD8+ cytotoxic subset vs the CD8+ suppressor subset, seems very important in order to understand the functional role(s) played by CD8+ cells in infiltrating the inflammatory or neoplastic lesional skin.Paller and coworkers state that, since they found neither CD16+ cells nor CD11+ cells in the skin of patients with acute graft-vs-host disease, the infiltrating CD8+ cells are probably cytotoxic.¹ I would like to suggest the opportunity to also employ, in order to add strength to such an assumption, the 9.3 monoclonal antibody, since the expression of the surface polypeptides recognized