FLT3 gene-expression signature in normal karyotype AML. Homo sapiens

Acute myeloid leukemia with normal karyotype (NK-AML) represents a cytogenetic grouping with intermediate prognosis but substantial molecular and clinical heterogeneity. Within this subgroup, presence of FLT3 (FMS-like tyrosine kinase 3) internal tandem duplication (ITD) mutation predicts less favorable outcome. The goal of our study was to discover gene-expression patterns correlated with FLT3-ITD mutation, and to evaluate the utility of a FLT3 signature for prognostication. The dataset comprises gene-expression profiles of 137 normal karyotype acute myeloid leukemia (NK-AML) specimens carried out using Stanford cDNA microarrays, to accompany the study of L Bullinger et al. For each array, Channel 2 represents Cy5-labeled NK-AML RNA, and Channel 1 Cy3-labeled universal reference RNA. Keywords: Logical Set Overall design: DNA microarrays were used to profile gene expression in a training set of 65 NK-AML cases. Supervised analysis was applied to build a gene expression-based predictor of FLT3-ITD mutation status. The predictor was then evaluated by classifying expression profiles from an independent test set of 72 NK-AML cases.