Study reveals high-risk subtype of relapsing childhood AML

When acute myeloid leukemia (AML) relapses, treatment is more difficult, with dismal results

"We started out wide because, obviously, we didn't have a good enough understanding of what causes childhood acute myeloid leukemia to relapse in the first place," said co-corresponding author Jeffery Klco, MD, of the St.

"It became clear very early on that there was a group of cases with strange alterations in this gene UBTF that had really only been considered superficially in the past," Klco said

A new high-risk subtype

The researchers assessed the genomics of 136 St.

UBTF-TD AML is more common in children than adults

genetic analysis

The genomics of AML has been studied for many years, but this mutation has been mostly overlooked or undetected in previous work

"This is an extremely difficult mutation to detect, so it took a lot of work to develop the correct algorithm

"Now that we know what we're looking for and how to find it, we can easily apply it to clinical genomics," Ma said

Clinical genomics can be used to screen for UBTF-TD mutations in AML to help identify high-risk patients