High WT1 Expression Associates with Unfavorable Prognosis in Acute Myeloid Leukemia

Shuqi Zhao, Hanzhang Pan, Qi Guo, Wanzhuo Xie, Jie Jin and Jinghan Wang

Department of Hematology, The First Affiliated Hospital, Zhejiang University College of Medicine, China
Department of Nephrology, The First Affiliated Hospital, Zhejiang University, China

^*Correspondance to: Jinghan Wang 

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Abstract:

Background: Recently, WT1-specific Chimeric Antigen Receptor (CAR) - T cell has been identified and evaluated in clinical trials of Acute Myeloid Leukemia (AML). However, the clinical impact of Wilms' Tumor 1 (WT1) expression is still unclear. Therefore, we enrolled two cohorts of AML patients to evaluate the prognostic significance.
Methods: We measured WT1 transcript by real-time quantitative PCR in 173 Cytogenetically Normal AML (CN-AML). To assess the prognostic value of WT1 transcript, we classified patients into high and low groups based on the higher quartile of WT1 expression. The independent prognostic value of WT1 expression was investigated in the context of the well-established predictors including white blood cell counts, age, European Leukemia Net genotype (NPM1 mutations and lacking FLT3-ITD
or CEBPA double allele mutations), mutated genes of IDH1, IDH2 and DNMT3A. In addition, the published GSE12417 data was used as an external validation.
Results: High WT1 expressers have the higher levels of white blood cell counts, and higher percentage of FLT3-ITD and NPM1 mutations. Moreover, high WT1 expressions are positively correlated with the adverse overall survival in patients with CN-AML. This result was also validated in the independent cohort of 163 CN-AML patients from the public dataset GSE12417.
Conclusion: We found high WT1 expression is associated with unfavorable overall survival in CNAML patients.

Keywords:

WT1; Acute myeloid leukemia; Prognosis; mRNA

Cite the Article:

Zhao S, Pan H, Guo Q, Xie W, Jin J, Wang J. High WT1 Expression Associates with Unfavorable Prognosis in Acute Myeloid  Leukemia. Clin Oncol. 2021;6:1793..