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Minimal residual disease assessment by next-generation sequencing. Better tools to gaze into the crystal ball?

Bone Marrow Transplantation volume 52, pages 952–954 (2017)Cite this article

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Cure rates have been improving in the treatment of ALL, mainly in pediatrics. Nevertheless, nobody can read what is on the cards, nor can they ever predict whether a single child with ALL would be ultimately cured or not. Biological prognostic features and multi-step assessment of response to therapy can help to better stratify patients and tailor treatment.

Minimal residual disease (MRD) is one of the most powerful tools available to predict the risk of relapse.1 As expected, though, even allocation by MRD results cannot account for all relapse events, as further intensified chemotherapy treatment might change the course of the disease after each measurement. When no further chemotherapy is planned, as after transplantation, MRD detection would be expected to be invariably associated with relapse. This is not the case, fortunately, as we learnt in the last decade, consistently for different groups.2, 3, 4, 5, 6 MRD positivity after transplant was associated with a 40% probability of survival in our series of 82 transplanted pediatric patients, as previously reported.2

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  1. Clinica Pediatrica Università degli Studi di Milano Bicocca, Monza, (MB), Italy

    A Balduzzi

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Balduzzi, A. Minimal residual disease assessment by next-generation sequencing. Better tools to gaze into the crystal ball?. Bone Marrow Transplant 52, 952–954 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/bmt.2017.104

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