IGVH-mutation status may be more easily measured via a chromatin profile

[AussieNeil]

The late Prof Terry Hamblin discovered that CLL IGVH mutation status clearly identified probable time to treatment, with patients IGVH mutated typically having a much longer time to treatment if they needed treatment at all. Furthermore, unlike other prognostic markers, the IGVH mutation prognostic marker doesn't change with time or treatment. Unfortunately the test has proven difficult to do reliably, driving the search for easier to perform alternatives which include ZAP-70 and CD38 status, which unfortunately do change over time and with treatment. No mention in this article whether chromatin profile testing could be developed to replace more difficult IGVH mutation testing, but watch this space...

'...chromatin profiles and gene regulatory networks accurately predicted IGHV mutation status and pinpointed differences between IGVH-mutated and IGVH-unmutated CLL.

“Our study has been able to dissect the variability that exists in the epigenome of CLL patients and helped to identify disease-specific changes, which will hopefully be informative for distinguishing disease subtypes or identifying suitable treatments,” said study author Jonathan Strefford, PhD, of the University of Southampton in the UK. '

Hematology Times (free registration)

hematologytimes.com/p_artic...

Neil

Photo: Sculpture of Emu and chicks made from shearing combs! That's a lot of shorn sheep!

[Psmithuk]

Love the emu, particularly her hat! Keep up the shearing, boys, we spinners need your lovely fleeces!

[Cllcanada Top Poster CURE Hero]

Here is the full paper in Nature ...

nature.com/ncomms/2016/1606...

[gardening-girl]

Thanks Neil for the link to the HematologyTimes article and thanks Chris for the link to the original Nature Communications article. It seems to me that the current technique for determining IGHV mutation status (that also identifies which VH family region is used) is simpler and more direct than the ATAC-seq assay used to determine chromatin accessibility as described in the Nature Communications paper. Useful information may come out of such analyses, for example explaining why the IGHV mutation status is a predictor of disease prognosis, but I don't anticipate that it will lead to a faster and less expensive clinical test.

gardening-girl