BioProject

Epigenetic therapy, using hypomethylating agents (HMA), is known to be effective in the treatment of high-risk myelodysplastic syndromes (MDS) and acute myeloid leukemia (AML) patients who are not suitable for intensive chemotherapy or allogeneic stem cell transplantation. More...

Epigenetic therapy, using hypomethylating agents (HMA), is known to be effective in the treatment of high-risk myelodysplastic syndromes (MDS) and acute myeloid leukemia (AML) patients who are not suitable for intensive chemotherapy or allogeneic stem cell transplantation. However, response rates to HMA are low and there is an unmet need in finding prognostic and predictive biomarkers of treatment response. We performed global methylation analysis of 75 patients with high risk MDS and secondary AML (sAML) who were included in CETLAM MDS-09 protocol, in which patients received HMA or intensive treatment according to age, comorbidities and cytogenetics. At diagnosis, no global methylation pattern allowed us to differentiate patients according to the cytological subtype, cytogenetics or treatment response. But we found a methylation signature defined by 200 probes, which allowed us to distinguish between responding and non-responding patients to azacitidine (AZA) treatment. Studying follow-up samples, we have confirmed that AZA decreases global DNA methylation, but in our cohort the degree of methylation decrease did not correlate with the type of response. The methylation signature detected at diagnosis was not useful in treated samples to determine a methylation pattern predictive of progression or relapse. In conclusion, altered DNA methylation patterns at diagnosis, in a subset of determined CpGs, may serve as biomarker for predicting AZA response. Overall design: Bisulphite converted DNA from the 202 samples were hybridised to the Illumina Infinium 450k Human Methylation Beadchip Definitions: DX = at Diagnosis CTR = Control (Healthy Donor) POST TPH = Post Transplant Less...