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BAALC and ERG expression levels at diagnosis have no prognosis impact on acute myeloid leukemia patients undergoing allogeneic hematopoietic stem cell transplantation

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Abstract

Brain and acute leukemia, cytoplasmic (BAALC) and ETS-related gene (ERG) expression levels are independent prognostic factors for acute myeloid leukemia (AML); however, their prognostic impacts on AML patients undergoing allogeneic hematopoietic stem cell transplantation (allo-HSCT) require further investigation. We studied 71 de novo AML patients treated with allo-HSCT and defined low and high expressers according to the median expression levels of BAALC and ERG at diagnosis respectively. High BAALC expression was associated with wild-type NPM1 (P = 0.000) and RUNX1 mutations (P = 0.027). High ERG expression was associated with FLT3-ITD absence (P = 0.003) and wild-type NPM1 (P = 0.001). BAALC and ERG expression levels were significantly correlated with each other (P = 0.001). Survival analyses including Kaplan-Meier curves and univariate and multivariate analysis consistently reported that there were no significant differences for both event-free survival (EFS) and overall survival (OS) (all P > 0.1), between high versus low BAALC and ERG expressers. Our study suggested that despite of their well-known adverse role in prognosis of AML, neither BAALC nor ERG expression levels at diagnosis had effect on survival of AML patients who underwent allo-HSCT.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by grants from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (81500118, 61501519), the China Postdoctoral Science Foundation funded project (Project No. 2016M600443), and PLAGH project of Medical Big Data (Project No. 2016MBD-025).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Hematology and Lymphoma Research Center, Peking University, Third Hospital, 49 Huayuan North Road, Beijing, 100191, China

    Jilei Zhang, Gaoqi Zhang, Xinpei Zhang, Xinrui Yang, Siyuan Yang, Jing Wang, Xiaoyan Ke & Lin Fu

  2. Department of Biomedical Engineering, Chinese PLA General Hospital, Beijing, 100853, China

    Jinlong Shi

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  1. Jilei Zhang
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Correspondence to Lin Fu.

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All data in this study were downloaded from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) database, and all procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the 1964 Helsinki declaration. Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study. For this type of study, formal consent is not required.

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Zhang, J., Shi, J., Zhang, G. et al. BAALC and ERG expression levels at diagnosis have no prognosis impact on acute myeloid leukemia patients undergoing allogeneic hematopoietic stem cell transplantation. Ann Hematol 97, 1391–1397 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00277-018-3331-8

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