The Level of Histone Deacetylase 7 in Pediatric ALL and Its Effect on Survival

Background

Leukemia is the most common pediatric malignancy and a major cause of mortality and morbidity in children. Nearly 15,000 children are newly diagnosed with leukemia in China each year and among them, acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) accounts for more than 75%. Altered expression of histone deacetylases (HDACs) is a common feature in several human malignancies and may represent an interesting target for cancer treatment . With increasing focus on precision medicine, HDACs have emerged as promising therapeutic target in pediatric ALL.

Methods

We detect the histone deacetylase 7(HDAC7) expression in the bone marrow samples of 254 children with newly diagnosed acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) at Hematology Oncology Center of Beijing Children`s Hospital from January 2010 to the end of 2012 via qRT-PCR using the TaqMan gene expression probes. 3 patients that have been completely remission for 3 years are used as normal control. We find out that the expression levels of HDAC7 are associated with the unfavorable events (such as induction failure, relapse and/or death due to any cause ) occurence rates and 5-EFS.

Results

Here we find that the HDAC7 expression levels are associated with the unfavorable events occurence rates and 5-EFS. We find that in the intermediate risk group of 157 patients, the patients who have lower level of HDAC7 expression have higher unfavorable event occurence rates than the higher expression of HDAC7 group (p=0.001). The group of higher HDAC7 expression have higher 5-EFS than the lower group in both the intermediate risk group(p=0.001) and the T-ALL group(n=18).

Conclusion

We conclude that HDAC7 has a potent anti-oncogenic effect on specific pediatric B-cell leukemia, indicating that its deregulation may contribute to the pathogenesis of the disease.