| Popis: |
Acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) is the most common but also the most successfully treated malignancy in children. Current cure rates of approximately 85 % have been reached through multi-agent therapeutic regimens and particularly through risk-stratification enabling therapy individualization. Nevertheless, relapse is still the main cause of treatment failure. Therefore, the main effort is now focused on improving the outcome of high risk ALL subtypes, i.e., Ph + ALL, infant ALL, ALL with MLL gene rearrangements, hypodiploid ALL, some T-ALL subsets, recurrent and refractory leukemia. Recent research using advanced molecular techniques, in particular microarray-based genomic gene expression profiling (GEP) and high resolution single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) microarray approaches, resulted in the identification of novel genetic factors with a potential impact on ALL classification and treatment. The main goal is now to translate these findings on ALL blast biology and those on pharmacogenetics of patient response to therapy into improved diagnostics, prognostic classification, and treatment of this malignancy. |
