Detection and Molecular Monitoring of Minimal Residual Disease in Chronic Myelogenous Leukemia

Abstract

Copyright: © 2012 Yin CC, et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. The term “minimal residual disease” refers to the persistence of residual neoplastic cells below the threshold of conventional morphologic detection. Monitoring of MRD plays a critical role in the early detection of impending hematologic relapse of many hematopoietic neoplasms, which allows for timely therapeutic intervention and improved clinical outcome. Chronic Myelogenous Leukemia (CML) is a myeloproliferative neoplasm that originates from an abnormal pluripotent hematopoietic stem cell and is characterized by the presence of t (9;22)(q34;q11.2)/BCR-ABL1 fusion resulting in the Philadelphia chromosome (Ph). The chimeric BCR-ABL1 fusion protein has constitutive tyrosine kinase activity that plays an essential role in CML pathogenesis, and provides the basis for the diagnosis, target therapy and MRD monitoring of CML.