Detection of immunoglobulin genes rearrangements in patients with acute lymphoblastic leukemia using highthroughput next generation sequencing

Monitoring of minimal residual disease (MRD) proved to be a valuable tool for predicting relapse in patients with acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL). However, the universal use of MRD monitoring in routine clinical practice is limited because current MRD assays have some methodological difficulties, high price and ambiguity of assay results interpretation. Here we describe next generation sequencing based system for the detection of clonal rearrangements in immunoglobulin genes loci. We performed testing of the system on 17 initial bone marrow samples from B-ALL patients. We revealed 1 to 6 characteristic immunoglobulin genes rearrangements in each of 16 samples. These results are in a good accordance with the results obtained by traditional BIOMED-2 assay. Further improvement of the reported system will provide highly reliable and sensitive technique for MRD monitoring.

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