Gene expression profiles uncover molecular classifiers for the prediction of progression-free survival in diffuse large B-cell lymphoma: results of a DASL assay from formalin fixed paraffin embedded tissue

Diffuse large B-cell lymphoma (DLBCL) exhibits heterogeneous clinical outcomes even in tumors of the same stage and with similar pathological characteristics. A substantial number of patients with DLBCL still fail to be cured despite recent improvements in therapy. In this study, we used formalin fixed paraffin embedded (FFPE) tumor samples for microarray gene expression profiling to develop robust prognostic profiles for DLBCL. We performed a retrospective microarray gene expression profiling study of FFPE from a cohort of DLBCL patients using the whole genome cDNA mediated Annealing, Selection and Ligation (WG-DASL) assay. After removing poor-quality samples, data from 164 patients were used for statistical analyses to develop and validate a prognostic gene expression signature using a gradient lasso and leave-one-out cross-validation process.

弥漫大B细胞淋巴瘤（Diffuse large B-cell lymphoma, DLBCL）即便在分期一致、病理特征相似的肿瘤中，仍表现出显著的临床结局异质性。尽管近年来治疗手段取得了一定进展，但仍有大量DLBCL患者无法获得临床治愈。本研究以福尔马林固定石蜡包埋（formalin fixed paraffin embedded, FFPE）肿瘤样本为材料，开展基因表达微阵列谱分析，以期构建稳健的DLBCL预后基因表达特征。我们针对某队列DLBCL患者的FFPE样本，采用全基因组cDNA介导的退火、选择与连接（whole genome cDNA mediated Annealing, Selection and Ligation, WG-DASL）检测方法，进行了回顾性基因表达微阵列谱分析。在剔除质量不佳的样本后，最终纳入164例患者的数据集开展统计分析，通过梯度Lasso（gradient lasso）与留一交叉验证（leave-one-out cross-validation）流程，完成了预后基因表达特征的构建与验证。