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Browsing by Subject "acute myeloid leukemia"

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  • Development of High Throughput Flowcytometric Assay for Immunophenotypical Quantification of Leukemic Stem Cells and Phenotype Based Drug Sensitivity Approach in Acute Myeloid Leukemia 
    Deb, Debashish (2019)
    There is significant reduction in number of approved drugs for acute myeloid leukemia in recent years. Partially it may be due to the failure of discovery and validation approach to new drugs as well as the complexity of the disease. Ex vivo functional drug testing is a promising approach to identify novel treatment strategies for acute myeloid leukemia (AML). In ideal condition, an effective drug should eradicate the immature AML blasts, but spare non-malignant hematopoietic cells. However, current strategies like conventional cell viability assay fail to measure cell population-specific drug responses. Hence, development of more advanced approaches is needed. Using multiparameter, high-content flow cytometry (FC), we simultaneously evaluated the ex vivo sensitivity of different cell populations in multiple (10) primary AML samples to 7 FDA/EMA-approved drugs and 8 drug combinations. Amongst the 7 tested drugs, venetoclax, cytarabine and dasatinib were very cytotoxic with venetoclax had the highest blast-specific toxicity, and combining cytarabine with JAK inhibitor ruxolitinib effectively targeted all leukemic blasts but spared non-malignant hematopoietic cells. Taken together, we show that the ex vivo efficacy of targeted agents for specific AML cell population can be assessed with a cell phenotype, FC-based approach. Furthermore, we put an effort to analyze the potential of this assay and biomarkers to predict the clinical outcome of individual patients and future perspectives.
  • Transcriptomic characterization of ERCC6L2 -mutated fibroblasts 
    Ikonen, Ina Kristiina (2023)
    Biallelic germline mutations in ERCC6L2 cause bone marrow failure (BMF) and predisposition to myelodysplastic syndrome (MDS) and acute myeloid leukemia (AML). The patients often develop varying cytopenias, and underlying hypoplasia in the bone marrow is usually evident. The aim of this thesis was to characterize the transcriptome of patient -derived fibroblasts with biallelic germline ERCC6L2 mutation. Moreover, the aim was to study changes on the gene expression at the RNA level in fibroblasts in different media conditions, ROS levels in ERCC6L2 -mutated fibroblasts, and whether addition of glutamine impacts the ROS levels. Fibroblasts from 16 skin biopsies were cultured; eight samples were from healthy controls and eight samples from patients with known mutations in ERCC6L2. Fibroblasts were cultured in different media conditions, followed by RNA extraction and RNA sequencing. We observed downregulation in base excision repair, nucleotide excision repair, mismatch repair, DNA replication, homologous recombination, and cell cycle in ERCC6L2 -mutated cells. MAPK signaling pathway, p53 signaling pathway, apoptosis, AMPK signaling pathway, and TGF-beta signaling pathway were in turn upregulated in ERCC6L2 -mutated cells. The medium did not affect the gene expression significantly across samples. We suspect that the effect of medium was not detected at the RNA level, but it might affect post-translational modifications. We also detected increased ROS levels in ERCC6L2 samples compared to control and observed decreased ROS levels in ERCC6L2 and control samples with excess glutamine. This study shows that biallelic mutations in ERCC6L2 do not only affect the bone marrow but can also affect tissues outside of the hematopoietic system. The transcriptomic analysis identified important biological processes, which could be studied with more detail in the future to further explore the pathology of the ERCC6L2 disease.

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