Identification of multiple subclones in peripheral T-cell lymphoma, not otherwise specified with genomic aberrations

Peripheral T-cell lymphoma, not otherwise specified (PTCL, NOS) with genomic aberrations has been shown to resemble lymphoma-type adult T-cell leukemia/lymphoma (ATLL) in terms of its genomic aberration patterns, histopathology, and prognosis. We have shown recently that a majority of patients with acute-type ATLL have multiple subclones that were likely produced in lymph nodes. In this study, we analyzed whether PTCL, NOS with genomic aberrations also has multiple subclones as found in ATLL by means of high-resolution oligo-array comparative genomic hybridization (CGH). Thirteen cases of PTCL, NOS were available for 44K high-resolution array CGH analysis. The results showed that 11 (84.6%) of the 13 cases had a log2 ratio imbalance, suggesting that multiple subclones exist in PTCL, NOS with genomic aberrations. In order to analyze the association between multiple subclones and prognosis, we used previous bacterial-artificial chromosome (BAC) array analyses for 29 cases and found that the existence of multiple subclones was associated with a poor prognosis (P = 0.0279).