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Molecular classification of Lymphoma
Collaborator: Joint Research Project "Molecular Mechanisms in Malignant Lymphoma" funded by Deutsche Krebshilfe
Burkitt's lymphoma (BL) and diffuse large-B-cell lymphoma (DLBCL) are subtypes of mature aggressive B-cell lymphoma. The diagnostic distinction of BL from DLBCL is of special clinical interest since BL differs in therapy and outcome. The definition of BL is based on morphology, particular genetic features and immunohistochemical staining patterns. Using current diagnostic criteria BL is often mixed up with DLBCL. So, the current definition of BL seems not to capture the full biological spectrum of BL. An improved definition of BL using gene expression profiling was part of the Joint Research Project "Molecular Mechanisms in Malignant Lymphoma" (MMML) which is supported by the Deutsche Krebshilfe. Building a gene expression based diagnostic signature to distinguish BL and DLBCL is an unsupervised learning problem were we know the true diagnosis of BL only for a small core group of samples. Within the MMML-project we developed the core group extension algorithm. Starting from a small set of samples of known diagnosis it searches additional cases within a set of samples of unkown diagnosis and similarly delivers a diagnostic signature. We successfully applied this algorithm to define a gene expression based signature for Burkitt's lymphoma. Ongoing work on lymphma also includes the dissection of DLBCL and BL into further clinically relevant subtypes by hierarchical network models of large scale genetic data (array-CGH, FISH), immunophenotypes and mRNA-profiles.
Publications
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