[WT 1 and leukemia]

The WT 1 gene has been isolated as a tumor suppressor gene of Wilms' tumor. Using reverse transcriptase-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR), relative levels of the WT 1 gene expression was examined in 87 patients with acute leukemia, 25 with chronic myelogenous leukemia (CML), and 24 with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma (NHL). Significant levels of the WT 1 gene were expressed in all leukemia patients, and for CML the levels increased as the clinical phase progressed. No point mutations were found in the WT 1 gene when samples from 15 acute leukemia patients were subjected to PCR single-strand conformation polymorphism analysis. In striking contrast to acute leukemia, the levels of WT1 gene expression for NHL were significantly low or even undetectable. The levels of WT 1 gene expression inversely correlated with the prognosis of acute leukemia. The quantification of the WT 1 gene expression made it possible to detect minimal residual disease (MRD) in acute leukemia regardless of the presence of absence of tumor-specific DNA markers. Simultaneous monitoring of MRD by RT-PCR using primers for specific DNA markers in four patients (two AML-M3 with PML/RAR-alpha, one AML-M2 with AML1/ETO, and one CML with bcr/abl) detected MRD comparable to that obtained from quantitation of WT 1 gene expression. In a patient with acute promyelocytic leukemia, the limits of leukemic cell detection by RT-PCR using either WT 1 or PML/RAR-alpha gene primers were 10(-3)-10(-4) and 10(-4) for bone marrow, and 10(-5) and 10(-4) for peripheral blood, respectively.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)