Development of MLL-rearranged leukemia is dependent on a transcriptional program orchestradt by C/EBPα

Translocations involving the MLL genes are frequently found in Acute Myeloid Leukemia (AML) and are associated with poor prognosis. The MLL fusion proteins act as aberrant transcription factor activating a transcriptional program that transforms the cells, potentially through collaboration with other transcription factors. To investigate this we searched gene expression profiles from patients with MLL-rearranged AML compared with normal hematopoietic progenitor cells for transcriptional regulators and found targets of C/EBPα to be up-regulated in the AML samples, suggesting that C/EBPα might collaborate with MLL fusion proteins in the initial transformation process. We could show that transformation by MLL fusion proteins is dependent on C/EBPα activity both in early progenitors as well as in GMPs. In contrast, C/EBPα was found to be indispensable in an already established leukemia. These results suggest that C/EBPα play an important role in the early transforming event of leukemogenesis. We used microarray to study the early transcriptional changes induced by MLL-ENL expression and we identified a combined C/EBPα / MLL-ENL transcriptional signature. 3 Cebpaflox/flox;Mx1Cre and 3 Cebpaflox/flox;Mx1Cre- mice were sacrificed 14 days after pIpC injection and bone marrow cells were harvested, enriched for cKit-expression and transduced with a pMIG retroviral vector expressing the MLL-ENL fusion protein and GFP. 72 h post first transduction, GFP-positive or negative PreGM cells were sorted.