Modulation of immune system mediated by ibrutinib in chronic lymphocytic leukemia

Our project is based on the hypothesis that ibrutinib could interfere with chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) microenvironment, modulating the immune response. The aim of the project is to understand if and how ibrutinib modifies the tumor microenvironment accessory cells in CLL, specifically nurse like cells (NLC). Large-scale gene expression profiling (GEP) was performed on total RNA extracted from NLC treated or not (control sample) over-night with 0.5µM Ibrutinib (RNeasy Mini kit Plus, QIAGEN, Valencia, CA, USA) from 10 individual CLL patients by hybridization on 4X44K Whole Human Genome Microarray (Agilent Technologies, Palo alto, CA). Fluorescence data were analysed with Feature Extraction Software v.10.5 (Agilent Technologies) an QC Chart tool v.1.3.