BioCentury
ARTICLE | Cover Story

Applying high throughput to CLL

March 21, 2013 7:00 AM UTC

Boston researchers have provided a detailed look at how cancer genome evolution alters clinical outcomes in chronic lymphocytic leukemia,1 and a Michigan team has identified a new transcriptional fusion that could broadly contribute to the pathogenesis of CLL.2 Both studies provide insights that could guide the development of new diagnostics and therapeutics for patients with CLL.

CLL is the second most common type of adult leukemia and has highly variable clinical progression. To better understand the origin of this variability, multiple groups have set out to conduct high throughput DNA sequencing of CLL tumor samples from patients. In the last two years, whole-exome analysis of hundreds of these tumors has shown that the disease is associated with a large number of mutations, with no one predominant mutation or pathway.3-5...