SUMMARY
Paediatric B-cell precursor acute lymphoblastic leukaemia arises from recurrent genetic lesions that block precursor B-cell differentiation and drive aberrant proliferation and cell survival. Risk-adapted intensive chemotherapy has been a major breakthrough in reaching the current survival rates of >90% for this ALL subtype. Recent developments in genome-wide genetic analysis have provided a wide range of chromosomal and genomic abnormalities characterising B-cell precursor acute lymphoblastic leukaemia, several of which are associated with patient outcome. This article summarises the results of several studies performed during the PhD thesis of Dr Farzaneh Ghazavi. This research project has led to the identification of a novel molecular lesion predicting poor outcome, a novel targetable pathway in a subgroup of B-cell precursor acute lymphoblastic leukaemia patients and resulted in the identification of an ETV6/RUNX1-specific long non-coding RNA signature providing novel biological insights into ETV6/RUNX1-mediated leukemogenesis.
(BELG J HEMATOL 2017;8(3):118–21)
