Gene expression profiles of nurse-like cells (NLCs) generated in vitro from chronic lymphocytic leukemia in presence of lenalidomide. Homo sapiens

NLCs were generated in vitro by culturing PBMCs from CLL patients for 10 days with/without the addition of 0.5 µM lenalidomide. Then, nonadherent cells were removed by vigorous pipetting and the remaining adherent cells were harvested for analyses. We inspected the whole-genome gene expression profiles of NLCs (control sample vs. lenalidomide-treated sample) derived from 4 CLL patients by microarray. Supervised analysis identified 584 genes differentially expressed upon lenalidomide treatment, 352 up-regulated and 232 down-regulated (p<0.05). Overall design: RNA was extracted with the RNeasy Plus Mini kit (Qiagen, Valencia, CA, USA). Large-scale gene expression profiling (GEP) was performed by hybridizing RNA from NLCs treated or not with lenalidomide 0.5 µM for 10 days (n=4) on 4X44K Whole Human Genome Microarray (Agilent Technologies, Palo alto, CA). Genes were defined as differentially expressed between groups (NLCs CTRL vs. NLCs LENALIDOMIDE) at p<0.05 (paired t-test) and fold change ± 1.5 by using Gene Spring GX v12.6 (Agilent) software.