Project description:More than 40% of patients with AML have a normal karyotype and are included in the intermediate prognostic group, in which risk classification is currently poor defined and more molecular markers are needed to achieve treatment stratification. EVI1 overexpression (OE) has been reported to discriminate in this group those with a worse prognosis. The EVI1 mice homolog has a role in the HSC proliferation through Gata2 expression, therefore, GATA2, a transcription factor with a relevant role in hematopoiesis, could be a candidate gene in the leukemogenic transformation in AML in patients with normal karyotype, and in other subgroups. GATA2 OE was detected in 46% of cases with normal karyotype, and was more frequent among samples with FLT3-ITD (p=0.0021), especially among the AML-M1 cases. We found a mutational pattern FLT3-ITD/GATA2-OE/WT1-OE that could define a subgroup of patients with normal karyotype and AML-M1, with a different gene expression array pattern and a poor prognosis. Our results show that GATA2 OE is a common event in AML cases with normal karyotype (46%). The deregulation of the expression of the GATA2 transcription factor would lead to a hematopoietic differentiation impairs, focusing GATA2 as a candidate gene that fits in the cooperating model for the multistep pathogenesis that causes AML transformation. Keywords: Disease state analysis
Project description:Acute myeloid leukemia with normal karyotype (NK-AML) represents a cytogenetic grouping with intermediate prognosis but substantial molecular and clinical heterogeneity. Within this subgroup, presence of FLT3 (FMS-like tyrosine kinase 3) internal tandem duplication (ITD) mutation predicts less favorable outcome. The goal of our study was to discover gene-expression patterns correlated with FLT3-ITD mutation, and to evaluate the utility of a FLT3 signature for prognostication. The dataset comprises gene-expression profiles of 137 normal karyotype acute myeloid leukemia (NK-AML) specimens carried out using Stanford cDNA microarrays, to accompany the study of L Bullinger et al. For each array, Channel 2 represents Cy5-labeled NK-AML RNA, and Channel 1 Cy3-labeled universal reference RNA. Keywords: Logical Set