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An international team of researchers has discovered how to predict whether healthy individuals are at risk of developing acute myeloid leukemia, an aggressive and often fatal blood cancer.
An international team of researchers has discovered how to predict whether healthy individuals at risk of developing acute myeloid leukemia, an aggressive and often fatal blood tumor
The results, which have just been published in the journal Nature answer the question of where, when and how the disease begins, says John Dick, senior scientist at the Princess Margaret Cancer Center at the University of Toronto, pointed out that "we have successfully identified in the general population of people who have traces of mutations that represent the first stage of the study. normal blood cells begin the path that leads them to become more and more abnormal and exposes them to the risk of progressing to acute myeloid leukemia These traces can be found up to 10 years before acute myeloid leukemia actually develops Says Dick. "This long period of time gives us the first opportunity to think about how to prevent this tumor."
"Acute myeloid leukemia is a devastating disease that is generally diagnosed too late, with a mortality rate of 65% .Our results show that it is possible to identify individuals from the general population who are at high risk of developing a genetic test on a blood sample, "says another author, Sagi Abelson, also of the Princess Margaret Cancer Center.
" The ultimate goal is to identify these individuals and to identify them. study how we can affect mutated blood cells long before the disease actually starts. "
The study is based on the discovery made by Dick in 2014, and also published in Nature, that among all cells leukemia present in the blood sample taken from the patient at the time of diagnosis of acute myeloid leukemia, there could be a cellulose with pre-leukemic stem cells. A pre-leukemic stem cell still functions normally but has taken the first step in creating a cellular pathway that has become increasingly abnormal, leading to acute myeloid leukemia.
"In our 2014 study, we predicted that early detection in hematopoietic stem cells, long before the disease appears and makes them ill, should be identified within the general population in badyzing the presence of these mutations in a blood sample, "continues Dick.
Liran Shlush, a former colleague of Dick and currently stationed at the Weizmann Institute in Rehovot, Israel, coordinated the work. Using data from a large study badyzing the health status and lifestyle of European population and tracking 550,000 people over 20 years of age to determine their correlations with cancer.
The researchers Extracted data from more than 100 participants who developed acute myeloid leukemia 6 to 10 years after joining the study, as well as data from a cohort of more than 400 older people who did not p developed the disease
"We wanted to see if there was a difference between these two groups in the genetics of their" normal "blood samples taken at the time of enrollment. To find out, we developed a gene sequencing tool that could badyze the most common genes that are altered in patients with acute myeloid leukemia and we sequenced the 500 blood samples, "Dick explains.
Through this badysis, the researchers found that blood stem cells had begun to accumulate mutations years before an individual was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia, a discovery that allowed the The team predicted precisely who was at risk of progressing to the disease. 19659003] In addition, the team used advanced computer technology to test information obtained from blood samples collected regularly in Israel for more than 15 years and built a huge database of 3.4 millions of electronic health records.
he also deepened his understanding of the distinction between acute myeloid leukemia and a common feature of Aging called age-related clonal hematopoiesis (ARCH, acronym for age-related clonal hemopoiesis), a a condition in which blood stem cells acquire mutations and become a little more proliferative in healthy subjects without evidence of hematological disease. For the vast majority of people, it's just a completely benign characteristic of aging. In fact, all patients with acute myeloid leukemia have an ARCH, but not all subjects with ARCH do not develop the disease
S. Abelson et al. Prediction of the risk of acute myeloid leukemia in healthy individuals. Nature 2018
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