Angiopoietin-2 Expression in B-Cell Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia: Association with Clinical Outcome and Immunoglobulin Heavy-Chain Mutational Status.

B-cell Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia (B-CLL) follows an extremely variable clinical course. For some patients CLL is an indolent disease that never progresses to the point of requiring therapy and these patients have a survival time similar to age-matched controls. On the contrary, other patients experience rapidly deteriorating blood count and organomegaly which requires prompt treatment. The overall survival (OS) times range from months to decades. B-CLL patients can be divided into two subgroups on the basis of the presence or absence of somatic mutations in the specific immunoglobulin heavy-chain variable region (IgVH) genes used by leukemic cells. Patients with unmutated IgVH genes usually have an advanced stage and an unfavourable cytogenetic features, require therapy and have a short survival. The biological reasons of the different behaviour of Ig-mutated and Ig-unmutated leukemic clones have not been fully elucidated yet. Angiogenesis is a very complex network which is closely regulated by the orchestrating functions of many angiogenic factors. The balance of cellular expression of all these angiogenic factors determines vascular stabilization or angiogenic remodelling and sprouting or vessel regression. Increasing evidence shows that neovascularization plays a role in the biology of chronic lymphocytic leukemia. The goal of this study was to evaluate the angiogenic status of Ig-mutated and Ig-unmutated CLL in the attempt to identify a possible role of angiogenesis in the adverse clinical outcome of Ig-unmutated CLL patients. So, we first performed a large scale gene-expression analysis on 29 B-CLL patients using microarrays comprising about 20,000 probes and 208 angiogenesis-related genes. We identified 64 up-regulated genes in Ig-unmutated CLL relative to Ig-mutated CLL. Among them, we found angiopoietin-2 (Ang-2) as one of the highest differentially expressed gene (p=3.02x10⁻⁶). Then, we evaluated the Ang-2 expression both at transcript and protein level in a wide cohort of CLL, in normal controls and in other haematological malignancies. The data showed an extremely wide range of Ang-2 expression in B-CLL: Ang-2 high-expressing cases were characterized by advanced Binet stage (p=0.032) and significantly shorter progression-free survival than Ang-2 low-expressing subset (median, 16 vs. 146 months) (p=0.006). Moreover, there was a strong correlation between the IgVH mutational status and the Ang-2 gene expression level (p<0.0001). Ig-mutated CLL exhibited very low Ang-2 expression, absolutely similar to the levels measured in healthy controls (median, 0.27 vs. 0.32, p=0.959). On the contrary, Ig-unmutated CLL expressed up to one hundred-fold higher levels of Ang-2 than normal controls(median, 38.61 vs. 0.32, p=0.002). Moreover, Ang-2 was up-regulated in all investigated CML, ALL and AML samples. We observed extremely high levels of expression in CML and ALL (median Ang-2 mRNA, 3948.96 and 190.00, respectively), whereas moderately high levels of Ang-2 were found in AML patients (median, 16.21). These data suggest that increased angiogenesis due to high Ang-2 expression may be involved in adverse clinical outcome of Ig-unmutated CLL patients.