Disease status in patients with chronic myeloid leukemia is better characterized by BCR-ABL/BCR transcript ratio than by BCR-ABL transcript level, which may suggest a role of normal BCR gene in the disease pathogenesis.
Monitoring of BCR-ABL transcript level is widely used in chronic myeloid leukemia (CML) to follow up response to therapy. In this study we compare abilities of two quantitative RT-PCR assays to characterize the disease status in CML patients: RT-PCR quantifying the BCR-ABL transcript concentration and RT-PCR determining the BCR-ABL/BCR transcript ratio (R). We demonstrate that in non-responders only R, but not BCR-ABL, unambiguously characterizes the state of disease. Moreover, R values >1 found in all poor responders indicate lower BCR expression compared to BCR- ABL in these patients. Our results demonstrate the importance of BCR-ABL/BCR transcript ratio for the disease status and the disease prognosis characterization and suggest a possible role of the normal BCR gene expression in CML pathogenesis.
Moravcova
J
J
Institute of Hematology and Blood Transfusion, 12820 Prague, Czech Republic. jana.moravcova@uhkt.cz
Regner
J
J
Mouckova
D
D
Fiser
K
K
Zmekova
V
V
Malacova
R
R
Michalova
K
K
Klamova
H
H
D000328:Adult; D000368:Aged; D002471:Cell Transformation, Neoplastic; D018450:Disease Progression; D005260:Female; D016313:Genes, abl; D006801:Humans; D015464:Leukemia, Myelogenous, Chronic, BCR-ABL Positive / Q000235:genetics* / Q000473:pathology*; D008137:Longitudinal Studies; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D011379:Prognosis; D011505:Protein-Tyrosine Kinases / Q000096:biosynthesis*; D011518:Proto-Oncogene Proteins / Q000096:biosynthesis*; D051562:Proto-Oncogene Proteins c-bcr; D020133:Reverse Transcriptase Polymerase Chain Reaction
D011518:Proto-Oncogene Proteins; D011505:Protein-Tyrosine Kinases; C496613:BCR protein, human; D051562:Proto-Oncogene Proteins c-bcr