Altered protein profile in chronic myeloid leukemia chronic phase identified by a comparative proteomic study

Chronic myeloid leukemia is a hematological disorder in which the Ph chromosome is a marker of the disease, detected virtually in all cases. The chimeric transcripts encode a 210-kDa chimeric protein with altered tyrosine kinase activity, responsible for the disease phenotype. In this work, we tried to identify which are the molecular changes common to chronic phase patients, those that represent the chronic phase molecular phenotype. To address this problem we analyzed through a comparative proteomic approach, several CML bone marrow cells protein profile from patients in chronic phase and healthy bone marrow donors. From these results, we identified 31 differentially expressed proteins. Among these proteins, we pointed out c-Myc binding protein 1, 53BP1, Mdm4, OSBP-related protein 3 and Mortalin as putative candidates to BCR-ABL targets in chronic phase. Moreover, we describe for the first time the cytoplasmic protein map from bone marrow cells that helped in the elucidation of the changes we were looking for.