Flow Cytometry and Polymerase Chain Reaction-Based Analyses of Minimal Residual Disease in Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia.pdfVIP

Hindawi Publishing Corporation Advances in Hematology Volume 2010, Article ID 272517, 11 pages doi:10.1155/2010/272517 Review Article Flow Cytometry and Polymerase Chain Reaction-Based Analyses of Minimal Residual Disease in Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia Sabrina Uhrmacher, Felix Erdfelder, and Karl-Anton Kreuzer Department I of Internal Medicine, University at Cologne, Kerpener Straße 62, 50937 Cologne, Germany Correspondence should be addressed to Karl-Anton Kreuzer, karl-anton.kreuzer@uni-koeln.de Received 3 May 2010; Revised 9 July 2010; Accepted 30 July 2010 Academic Editor: Stefan Faderl Copyright © 2010 Sabrina Uhrmacher et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. New therapeutic strategies developed recently for chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) have led to remarkable treatment response rates and complete hematological remissions. This means highly sensitive and specific techniques are increasingly needed to evaluate minimal residual disease (MRD) in CLL patients. Quantitative MRD levels can be used as prognostic markers, where total MRD eradication is associated with prolonged survival. Nowadays, PCR and flow cytometry techniques used to detect MRD in CLL patients can generate reliable and quantitative results with the highest sensitivity. MRD Flow is based on four-color flow cytometry using specific antibody combinations. For allele specific oligonucleotide real-time quantification (ASO RQ) PCR individual primers are designed to detect a specific immunoglobulin heavy chain (IgH) rearrangement in each patient clone. Five comprehensive studies investigated and compa