Human t‐cell leukemia virus: Causative roles in development of adult t‐cell leukemia and provirus integration into leukemic cell DNA

Abstract Human T‐cell leukemia virus (HTLV) was isolated from a cutaneous T‐cell lymphoma patient by Gallo and his colleagues (Poiesz et al., 1980) and adult T‐cell leukemia virus (ATLV) was isolated from patients with adult T‐cell leukemia (ATL) in Japan (Yoshida et al., 1982). Originally, these two viral isolates were thought to be different since they were isolated from apparently different tumors. However, we have shown that HTLV in the Caribbean and ATLV in Japan are the same virus (Watanabe et al., 1983, 1984) and the patient from which HTLV was isolated was identified as an atypical case of ATL (Bunn et al., 1983).