The association between expression of hypoxia inducible factor-1α and multi-drug resistance of acute myeloid leukemia

Abstract

Background: Acute myeloid leukemia (AML) is the most common acute leukemia in adults, and chemotherapy is the main treatment. However, patients with AML poorly respond to chemotherapy because of multi-drug resistance (MDR); MDR may mainly involve hypoxia. Methods: To investigate the expression levels of hypoxia inducible factor-1α (HIF-1α), MDR1, multi-drug resistant associate protein (MRP), breast cancer resistance protein (BCRP), and lung resistance-associated protein (LRP) in MDR of AML, we detected the blood of 118 patients with AML and 20 healthy people through quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction (PCR). Data were statistically analyzed in SPSS v12.0 (SPSS Inc., Chicago, IL, USA). Results: In these hypoxia-induced genes, HIF-1α could be significantly correlated with (P 2 =0.114) and MRP (r 2 =0.086). In our study, the post-chemotherapy survival rate of patients with AML was significantly related to HIF-1α expression (P Conclusions: This finding indicated that HIF-1α could be considered as a prognosis indicator of patients with AML.