Acute leukemia: subtype discovery and prediction of outcome by gene expression profiling

Contemporary treatment of acute leukemia requires the accurate assignment of patients at diagnosis to specific risk groups. To determine whether gene expression profiling could enhance risk assignment, we used oligonucleotide microarrays to analyze the pattern of genes expressed in leukemic blasts from 360 pediatric ALL patients and 130 pediatric AML patients. Our analysis demonstrates that the single platform of gene expression profiling can accurately identify the known prognostically important genetic subtypes of ALL, including T-ALL, E2A-PBX1, TEL-AML1, MLL rearrangements, BCR-abl, and hyperdiploid >50 chromosomes, and AML, including t(15;17)[PML-RARalpha], t(8;21)[AML1-ETO], inv(16)[CBFbeta-MYH11], MLL gene rearrangement, and cases with FAB-M7 morphology. In addition, within ALL, a novel subgroup was identified based on its unique expression profile. Examination of the gene expression signatures for the different genetic subtypes of acute leukemia provided important insights into the molecular pathology of these leukemias.