PCR‐monitoring of minimal residual leukaemia after conventional chemotherapy and bone marrow transplantation in BCR‐ABL‐positive acute lymphoblastic leukaemia

摘要

We report the results of consecutive tests in nine BCR‐ABL‐positive ALL patients by one‐step and two‐step (nested primer) reverse transcriptase‐polymerase chain reaction (RT‐PCR). Six patients could be tested in complete haematological remission (CHR). One patient remained one‐step positive; four patients became one‐step negative, but remained two‐step positive; only one patient became two‐step negative. In five patients the haematological relapse was preceded by one‐step positivity by 1.5‐5 weeks. In two patients who received autologous BMT in CHR, BCR‐ABL was still detectable by two‐step PCR, whereas allogeneic BMT was able to transiently reduce BCR‐ABL below the two‐step detection level. Our results show that one‐step combined with two‐step RT‐PCR analysis gives valuable information about the efficacy of treatment an