The findings, published online in the journal New England Journal of Medicine, pave the way for developing better treatments for AML patients. They also could lead to ways to more accurately predict the severity of disease in individual patients.
"We now have a genetic playbook for this type of leukemia," says study co-leader Timothy Ley at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.
"We don't know all the rules yet, but we know all the major players. This information can help us begin to understand which patients need more aggressive treatment right up front and which can be treated effectively with standard chemotherapy."
The study included some 200 patients newly diagnosed with AML. The researchers sequenced the DNA of each patient's leukemia cells and compared the data to DNA from each patient's healthy cells. In this way, they found the mutations that only occurred in the cancer cells and contributed to the development and progression of AML in each patient.
Cancer cells in the AML patients had an average of 13 mutated genes, far fewer than the several hundred typically found in breast, lung, and other solid tumors, according to the study.
By studying a large number of AML cases, the scientists believe they have found nearly all of the major mutations that occur in patients with the disease.
source: interaksyon.com
