Clinical Application of Targeted and Genome-Wide Technologies: Can we Predict Treatment Responses in Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia?

Abstract

Chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) is low-grade lymphoma of mature B cells and it is considered to be the most common type of hematological malignancy in the western world. CLL is characterized by a chronically relapsing course and clinical and biological heterogeneity. Many patients do not require any treatment for years. Although important progress has been made in the treatment of CLL, none of the conventional treatment options are curative. Recurrent chromosomal abnormalities have been identified and are associated with prognosis and pathogenesis of the disease. More recently, unbiased genome-wide technologies have identified multiple additional recurrent aberrations. The precise predictive value of these has not been established, but it is likely that the genetic heterogeneity observed at least partly reflects the clinical variability. The present article reviews our current knowledge of predictive markers in CLL using whole-genome technologies.

KEYWORDS::

• chronic lymphocytic leukemia
• genome-wide technologies
• massively parallel sequencing
• next-generation technology
• predictive biomarker
• prognostic biomarker
• SNP microarray

Financial&competing interests disclosure

R Alsolami, SJL Knight and A Schuh are supported by the NIHR Biomedical Research Centre, Oxford (UK) with funding from the Department of Health‘s NIHR Biomedical Research Centres funding scheme. In addition, SJL Knight and A Schuh are supported by the Health Innovation Challenge Fund (HICF-1009–026), a parallel funding partnership between the Wellcome Trust and the Department of Health. The views expressed in this publication are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the Department of Health or the Wellcome Trust. SJL Knight is also supported by the Wellcome Trust Core Award Grant [090532/Z/09/Z] and R Alsolami by King Abdulaziz University (Saudi Arabia) Faculty of Applied Medical Sciences. The authors have no other relevant affiliations or financial involvement with any organization or entity with a financial interest in or financial conflict with the subject matter or materials discussed in the manuscript apart from those disclosed.

No writing assistance was utilized in the production of this manuscript.