Analysis of gene expression profiles to improve the treatment of leukemia

In clinical practice, acute myelocytic leukemia (AML) has been classified into favorable risk type, intermediate risk type and unfavorable risk type in order to take a proper treatment and good prognosis. Unfortunately, the majority of AML patients are defined as an intermediated risk and they have diverse responses to standard therapy. Some of them should accept the allogeneic hematopoietic stem cell transplantation after first induction remission to improve prognosis, but others can survive through the chemotherapy based on consolidation regimens. However, with the advanced high-throughput sequencing technology, people tend to view the complex interplay as a whole instead of investigating the abnormality independently. The gene expression profile consisting of variation of methylation, mRNA, microRNA and other information contribute to further specify the leukemia subtype and improve the treatment and prognosis of leukemia. Moreover, the gene expression profile can help to know more about the essential of the disease and to develop the new drug which is more effective and specific.PubMed061735-82