Hypoxia induced increase of IL-8 secretion was due to increased translational processing, as IL-8 PCR revealed significantly increased levels of mRNA for IL-8 after 48 hours of 1% O2 as compared to 21% O2 in AML cell lines OCI-AML3 and KG-1a (ΔΔCT 3.50 for OCI-AML3 and 1.95 for KG-1a, p < 0.01; Fig. 3E). Here, CXCL8 is linked to acute myeloid leukemia.