Impact of mircoRNA-125b expression as prognostic factor in acute myeloid leukemia

Abstract

Leukemia is among the main causes of death in the world. The most important etiology of leukemia is malignant transformation of myeloid or lymphoid cells to primary undifferentiated cells includingacute myeloid leukemia (AML). Adult acute myeloid leukemia (AML) is a heterogeneous disease in terms of diverse cytogenetic and molecular abnormalities. Although there has been a significant improvement in the overall survival rate of adult AML patients from 30 to 73 per cent, still nearly half of them relapse. Despite significant progress in the treatment of different types of leukemia, relapse remains a challenging clinical problem that is observed in a number of patients who are often resistant to chemotherapy and exhibit multi-drug resistance.Therefore, it is essential to identify new predictive factors of response to treatment or relapse, especially for high-risk patients with a greater potential for non-response to treatment. Detection of new and effective factors capable of differentiating between good and poor prognoses is of great importance for determining the prognosis of the disease and relapse at diagnosis. Recently, microRNAs especially (MiRNA-125b) have attracted much attention from researchers in a variety of cancers, including leukemia. In our study, it has shown that the ectopic expression of microRNAs affects the expression of drug resistance and relapse-associated genes. Altered microRNA expression profiles can turn these molecules into oncogenes or tumor suppressors, which affect the expression of relapse-related genes.