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Acute Leukemias

A 3-microRNA scoring system for prognostication in de novo acute myeloid leukemia patients

Leukemia volume 29, pages 1051–1059 (2015)Cite this article

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Abstract

As a highly heterogeneous disease, acute myeloid leukemia (AML) needs fine risk stratification to get an optimal outcome of patients. MicroRNAs have florid biological functions and have critical roles in the pathogenesis and prognosis in AML. Expression levels of some single microRNAs are influential for prognosis, but a system integrating several together and considering the weight of each should be more powerful. We thus analyzed the clinical, genetic and microRNA profiling data of 138 de novo AML patients of our institute. By multivariate analysis, we identified that high expression of hsa-miR-9-5p and hsa-miR-155-5p were independent poor prognostic factors, whereas that of hsa-miR-203 had a trend to be a favorable factor. We constructed a scoring system from expression of these three microRNAs by considering the weight of each. The scores correlated with distinct clinical and biological features and outperformed single microRNA expression in prognostication. In both ours and another validation cohort, higher scores were associated with shorter overall survival, independent of other well-known prognostic factors. By analyzing the mRNA expression profiles, we sorted out several cancer-related pathways highly correlated with the microRNA prognostic signature. We conclude that this 3-microRNA scoring system is simple and powerful for risk stratification of de novo AML patients.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by grants MOST103-2923-B-002-001, MOST102-2325-B-002-028 and MOST103-2314-B-002-131-MY3 from Ministry of Science and Technology (Taiwan), UN103-051 from National Taiwan University Hospital and National Taiwan University College of Medicine and MOHW102-TD-C-111-001 and MOHW103-TD-B-111-04 from Ministry of Health and Welfare (Taiwan).

Author Contributions

M-KC, Y-CC and W-CC analyzed the data and wrote the paper. W-CC and H-FT designed the study and wrote the paper. H-AH and EYC provided important materials and help in the study.

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  1. M-K Chuang and Y-C Chiu: These two authors contributed equally to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Laboratory Medicine, National Taiwan University Hospital, Taipei, Taiwan

    M-K Chuang & W-C Chou

  2. Graduate Institute of Biomedical Electronics and Bioinformatics, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan

    Y-C Chiu & E Y Chuang

  3. Department of Internal Medicine, National Taiwan University Hospital, Taipei, Taiwan

    W-C Chou, H-A Hou & H-F Tien

  4. Bioinformatics and Biostatistics Core, Center of Genomic Medicine, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan

    E Y Chuang

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  1. M-K Chuang
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Chuang, MK., Chiu, YC., Chou, WC. et al. A 3-microRNA scoring system for prognostication in de novo acute myeloid leukemia patients. Leukemia 29, 1051–1059 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1038/leu.2014.333

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