High expression of DOCK2 indicates good prognosis in acute myeloid leukemia

DOCK family proteins are evolutionarily conserved guanine nucleotide exchange factors for Rho GTPase with different cellular functions. It has been demonstrated that DOCK1 had adverse prognostic effect in acute myeloid leukemia (AML). We first analyzed data of 85 AML patients who were treated with chemotherapy and had available DOCK1 to DOCK11 expression information and found that DOCK1 and DOCK2 had prognostic significance in AML. In view of the known prognosis of DOCK1 in AML, we then explored the prognostic role of DOCK2. One hundred fifty-six AML patients with DOCK2 expression data were extracted from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) database and enrolled in this study. Patients were divided based on treatment modality into the chemotherapy group and the allogeneic hematopoietic stem cell transplant (allo-HSCT) group. Each group was divided into two groups by the median expression levels of DOCK2. In the chemotherapy group, high DOCK2 expression was associated with longer event-free survival (EFS, P=0.001) and overall survival (OS, P=0.007). In the allo-HSCT group, EFS and OS were not significantly different between high and low DOCK2 expression groups. Multivariate analysis showed that high DOCK2 expression was an independent favorable prognostic factor for both EFS and OS in all patients (all P<0.05). In conclusion, our results indicated that high DOCK2 expression, in contrast to DOCK1, conferred good prognosis in AML.