Leukemia fusion-gene transduced human cord blood cells

MLL-AF9 expression in normal human umbilical cord blood CD34+ cells leads to long-term proliferation of a myeloid progenitor cell with leukemogenic potential. Expression of a Core Binding Factor leukemia fusion (AML1-ETO or CBFbeta-SMMHC) in human CD34+ cells results in self-renewal of primitive progenitor cells with multilineage potential and stem cell ability, but these cells do not induce leukemia in immunodeficient mice. This comparative microarray study was initiated to determine how faithful these cell cultures are to the transcriptome of patient samples expressing each of these different fusion proteins, and to analyze the signaling pathways that are unique to CBF cultures and MLL-fusion cultures, with the hope of determining why the MLL-fusion cells are leukemogenic while the CBF cells are not.

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Wei J, Wunderlich M, Fox C, Alvarez S, Cigudosa JC, Wilhelm JS, Zheng Y, Cancelas JA, Gu Y, Jansen M, Dimartino JF, Mulloy JC